For Republicans looking for where to start investigating the former administration on what it did wrong, they could do a lot worse than whether U.S. astronauts were left stranded at the International Space Station due to politics in an election year.
During a media briefing from the ISS on Tuesday, one of the stranded astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore, seemed to confirm that President Joe Biden’s administration rejected an offer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to return the astronauts because it might make him and Donald Trump “look good.”
Wilmore, who has been up at the station for nine months with Sunita Williams after malfunctions with the Boeing Starliner crew capsule they were testing, said that what Musk was saying “is absolutely factual.”
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, Musk has said he offered to return the crew early but that the Biden administration “abandoned” the astronauts at the ISS for “political reasons.”
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS on June 6 for what was supposed to be a short stay — eight days, all to test the readiness of the Starliner.
However, numerous problems with the Boeing-built craft, notably with leaks in its helium cooling system and thruster issues, had left the astronauts in space.
Last month, Musk made mention of the Biden administration turning down a rescue mission from SpaceX, which has a tried and tested capsule, during a Fox News interview with President Donald Trump.
Trump added that Biden was planning to “leave them in space.”
Should there be an investigation into the stranding of these astronauts?
Wilmore was asked about this during the interview by a Washington Post reporter.
“I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual,” Wilmore said.
“We have no information on that, though, whatsoever: what was offered, what was not offered [in terms of flights], who it was offered to, how that process went — that’s information that we simply don’t have. So I believe him.
“I don’t know all those details, and I don’t think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for,” he added.
NEW: Astronaut says Elon Musk is “absolutely factual” after a WaPo reporter asked him about how Musk said his rescue efforts were denied for political reasons.@OldeWorldOrder@CollinRugg@IanJaeger29#Musk pic.twitter.com/i5JrH1W9Rn
— super dlcs (@superdlcs) March 6, 2025
As of right now, the crew will be departing from the ISS on March 19 or 20 aboard a SpaceX craft.
The Starliner, meanwhile, was sent home without a crew in September.
As for the decision to do that, the NASA administrator at the time — former Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson — said “I can tell you unequivocally, from a personal standpoint, that politics has not played any part in this decision. It absolutely has nothing to do with it.”
That’s not what the people up there have heard.
I’ll give the people up at the ISS that they’re not the ones down on the ground making the decisions and that they’re quite literally stuck in the biggest news vacuum possible: an actual vacuum.
However, one assumes they’ve been privy to 1) their fate and 2) discussion of it on planet Earth, especially given that it concerns their lives first and foremost. If there was a time to dispel the rumors that they were “abandoned” in space by the Biden administration, this would have been the time to say it.
Instead, no: “I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual.” That’s a damning statement, and one that Republicans should get around to investigating posthaste.
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