NASA’s top officials never received an offer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring home two US astronauts marooned in space earlier than planned, the agency’s former deputy administrator told Bloomberg. The comments cast doubt on Musk’s claims that his attempts to stage an early rescue mission were blocked by former US President Joe Biden’s White House because of the billionaire’s support of Donald Trump.
“An offer to bring the crew home early, it never came to headquarters,” Pam Melroy, a former astronaut who was second in command under NASA administrator Bill Nelson, said in an interview.
Musk, a close adviser to President Trump, said in a post on his social media site X last week that officials “flatly refused” his offer to bring home a pair of astronauts living on the International Space Station earlier than planned. “They did not want positive press for someone who supported Trump,” Musk said.
SpaceX could have returned the astronauts “months ago,” Musk wrote in a post on X in which he used a slur against a Danish astronaut who said Musk had lied in a joint interview with Trump.
Melroy said if Musk did speak to someone about this offer, it wasn’t anyone in NASA leadership.
“I don’t know who he spoke to,” she said. “It wasn’t Bill, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t our senior leadership at headquarters.”
Biden’s office often stayed out of NASA’s decision-making, said Melroy. “The White House was very good about letting us make safety decisions and leaving that to the experts at NASA,” she said.
The dispute surrounds two astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, who flew to the ISS in June on Boeing Co’s Starliner capsule, part of a roughly week-long test flight to determine if the vehicle was safe to carry humans to and from the station.
However, the Boeing spacecraft suffered numerous issues as it docked with the ISS. NASA officials decided in August to bring Starliner home without the crew on board and return Wilmore and Williams later on a SpaceX capsule. That SpaceX capsule, which launched in September as part of a previously scheduled Crew-9 mission to the ISS, is slated to bring the astronauts home next month, capping a roughly nine-month stay.
Much of the focus has centered on Wilmore and Williams’ unexpected prolonged trip in orbit, but Melroy said that politics never played a role in the route NASA managers took.
“It’s important to know that the decision was made about what the safest option to do was,” Melroy said, noting that bringing the crew home on an already scheduled rotation mission was the least risky option for NASA managers.
Melroy said that NASA leaders never heard of any offer from Musk to mount an additional SpaceX mission to bring the astronauts home early, nor did they hear of any offer to bring the Crew-9 capsule home earlier than planned.
Crew-9, with Wilmore and Williams on board, is set to return home in March after another SpaceX crewed mission, called Crew-10, launches to the ISS. SpaceX recently swapped out the spacecraft it plans to use for Crew-10 in order to get the mission into space sooner.
This decision safely accelerates the target launch of Crew-10 and the return of Crew-9, the agency said in a statement.
NASA prefers to have these crew “handovers,” with a new crew of astronauts arriving before the previous crew returns home. If Crew-9 had come home prior to Crew-10, it would have left a single US astronaut on the ISS for months, a scenario that NASA typically tries to avoid.
“It’s very undesirable from a crew safety standpoint,” Melroy said, noting the sole astronaut would have to handle any unexpected maintenance or emergencies alone. Having just one US astronaut would also slow research and experiment work on the station.
SpaceX and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Managers at various NASA groups over the weekend told employees to hold off on responding to an email sent on Musk’s orders asking people to describe what they had accomplished the previous week.
On Monday, a NASA spokesperson clarified that NASA leadership would respond to the email on behalf of the agency’s workforce.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Hindkesharistaff and is published from a syndicated feed.)