US astronauts stuck on space station because Biden didn’t want to risk rescue before election: ex-NASA spaceman
The two American astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months may have been stuck there because of the presidential election, one of their fellow spacemen thinks.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams are likely high and dry in space because President Biden wasn’t willing to risk a rescue going wrong after their initial ride home on a Boeing craft was deemed unsafe, according to Clayton “Astroclay” Anderson, a former astronaut.
“Elon [Musk] said it was politically motivated; I think there’s some truth in that,” Anderson, who also did time on the International Space Station, told The Post.
“He offered to bring them home earlier. It came about right before the election,” he added referring to Musk saying he’d rescue the pair with one of his SpaceX rockets.
“My opinion is that they didn’t want a disaster right before an election that they were trying to win and therefore asked the astronauts to sacrifice and stay in orbit.”
Musk posted on X on Feb. 20th: “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused.
“Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.”
Musk had thrown his support behind then-candidate Donald Trump in July 2024, less than a month after Wilmore and Williams were initially stranded. It is unclear when he reached out to Biden with his offer to rescue the astronauts.
During a press conference last week, from the International Space Station, Wilmore – who, alongside Williams, was only supposed to be in space for 10 days – backed up the allegations, saying: “I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual.”
Wilmore’s teenage daughter, Daryn, also said “there’s been negligence” which has led to her father being stranded on the space station.
She lamented in a TikTok, “It’s less the fact that he’s up there sometimes; it’s more the fact of why. There’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of things that I’m not at liberty say in that I don’t know fully about,” adding that she gets to talk to her dad almost daily.
Anderson said the reason why SpaceX and Boeing both have space contracts is so NASA has options when something does go wrong.The original reason why SpaceX and Boeing were contracted was to give NASA redundancy. We got into a perfect situation where redundancy could be utilized and it wasn’t.”
While Anderson explained politics should have no place in space travel, he acknowledged “we’re professionals. We’re willing to stay and bite the bullet for NASA. That’s the expectation. Astronauts know that any space flight can be extended or shortened within a moment’s notice for any reason.”
But that doesn’t mean that they have to like it. “If it were me and I had to stay longer like that, I would be very angry,” said Anderson, author of “The Ordinary Spaceman,” who has spent a total of 167 days in space, pointing out sympathy does not always come from where you would expect it.
“The prevailing attitude of people on the ground is just tolerate [the situation]. They’re in space; they’re superheroes; they get to see the Earth. They’ll get over it.”
Wilmore and Williams are currently on the Space Station with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, but will soon be back on Earth with their loved ones, traveling aboard a SpaceX four-seater. That craft brought the other two astronauts into space in September and has been docked at the ISS since then, according to USA Today.
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