US President Donald Trump and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk issued separate statements Tuesday night in the US, claiming that SpaceX will “go get” two astronauts on the International Space Station “as soon as possible,” despite NASA’s already announced plans to bring them home on a SpaceX capsule around March.
The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so.
Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2025
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2025
SpaceX is already on the hook to return Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the two astronauts Musk and Trump are presumably referencing in their social media posts and who have received increased media attention over their extended mission in orbit.
It’s unclear exactly what Trump and Musk mean considering the capsule that NASA has tasked with returning the astronauts is already up in space. It was launched in September and is now docked to the ISS.
Williams and Wilmore have been living on the space station since early June after arriving on a Boeing Co. Starliner capsule, becoming the first crew to fly on the vehicle as part of a critical test flight that was meant to last roughly a week.
But Starliner suffered numerous technical issues with its thruster engines during its flight and so NASA decided to bring the Boeing capsule home to Earth empty, with Williams and Wilmore to return on a future SpaceX capsule instead.