Elon Musk joined President Donald Trump in accusing the Biden administration of abandoning two NASA astronauts in space—claims the astronauts themselves have already denied.
In a joint interview with Trump on Fox News aired Tuesday night, Musk claimed U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, who have been aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for around eight months, were “left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”
The billionaire SpaceX CEO was responding to host Sean Hannity, who framed the matter as a rescue mission: “You’re committed to getting to Mars. You’re going to help rescue, next month, two astronauts that I think were abandoned—they dispute that in an interview.”
Williams and Wilmore were originally scheduled for a 10-day mission, but technical issues with their return vessel, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, delayed their return. They have been in space since June.
“At the president’s request, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed—kind of to a ridiculous degree…,” said Musk.
Trump interjected: “They got left in space.”
NASA has denied that the astronauts are stranded in space, explaining that their extended stay ensures the ISS remains properly staffed. Returning now, the agency said, would leave the station understaffed.
In an interview last week with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Williams and Wilmore themselves sought to set the record straight, rejecting claims that they had been “abandoned.”
“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck—and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore said. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
“If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed,’” Wilmore added. “That’s what we prefer.”
Williams said she and Wilmore “knew this was a test flight.”
“We knew that we would probably find some things (wrong with Starliner) and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise,” she said.
Musk told Hannity his company has “brought astronauts back from the Space Station many times before, and always with success.” He added that the astronauts would be returned to Earth in about four weeks, now that he had received the green light from Trump to bring them back.
Musk previously took to X to say he thought it was “terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
