NASA Astronauts Stuck On ISS Respond To Musk’s Claim He Offered To Get Them Home Early

Last year, on June 5, Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore departed for the ISS on board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. The trip was only supposed to last eight days, but due to problems with the Starliner ship, the astronauts were unable to return on their departure date, and the spacecraft returned uncrewed.

Though not ideal, the situation was not without precedent. Astronauts and cosmonauts have had to stay longer on various space stations after similar problems. 

In September 2023, astronaut Frank Rubio became the first NASA astronaut to stay in space for over a year. In 2022, Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin became stuck on the ISS when the cosmonauts’ ship became damaged by a meteoroid, resulting in a coolant leak. A second Soyuz spacecraft was sent to return the three to Earth safely. However, the crew could not simply leave the ISS, and remained to conduct the work which would have been carried out by a fresh crew delivery in the now-empty Soyuz craft.

Others have been stranded in space following the failures of shuttles. For instance, following the Columbia disaster in 2003, when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated during re-entry with seven astronauts on board, NASA suspended flights for two years while it investigated the failure. Astronauts then had to rely on the Soyuz spacecraft, and those still in space had to stay there for a few extra months.

Unfortunately, delays like this are part and parcel of human spaceflight, and operating a space station orbiting around the Earth. In order to run the space station properly and keep a human presence in space – and conduct all the research taking place on it – you need an adequate crew. Knowing this, Williams and Wilmore agreed to stay on board while NASA collaborated with Musk’s SpaceX on a return mission, to take place in March. For their part, the astronauts do not seem too unhappy with the situation, and have even participated in a spacewalk during normal ISS operations.

“We’re doing pretty darn good, actually. You know, we’ve got food, we’ve got clothes. We have great crew members up here,” Willams told CNN in an interview that aired on Friday, February 13, 2025.

“We don’t feel abandoned. We don’t feel stuck. We don’t feel stranded,” Wilmore added. “I understand why others may think that. We come prepared. We come committed. That is what your human spaceflight program is: It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those.”

While the astronauts do not feel stranded or abandoned, US President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Musk have made claims that the two are “stranded” in space, and were left up there for politcal reasons by the Biden administration. In a heated exchange with several astronauts, Musk even called European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and former ISS commander Andreas Mogensen a slur.

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During this exchange, Musk claimed that he had made an offer to bring the astronauts home early, but that it was rejected for political reasons.

“Price was never even discussed! They flatly refused. We would have made it work within the annual budget,” the head of DOGE wrote on X. “The real issue is that they did not want positive press for someone who supported Trump. That’s it. End of story.”

Well, that’s not quite the end of the story. While Musk claims that is the case, Williams and Wilmore say that they were unaware of any offer of the sort.

“From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all,” Wilmore said in an interview yesterday. “We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short. That’s what we do in human space flight. That’s what your nation’s human space flight program is all about, planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.”

Asked directly about the offer to bring them home early, Wilmore said that they had no knowledge of such an offer.

“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, who it was offered to, how that processes 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.”

While it is possible that word of the offer never made its way to the two on the ISS, NASA’s former deputy administrator and former astronaut, Pam Melroy has already said that she was unaware of an offer too.

“An offer to bring the crew home early, it never came to headquarters,” Melroy told Bloomberg in February.

“I don’t know who he spoke to,” she added. “It wasn’t Bill [Nelson], it wasn’t me. It wasn’t our senior leadership at headquarters.”

NASA’s former administrator Bill Nelson, who was in charge when decisions were being made about the crew’s return, backed up Melroy’s understanding of the situation.

“It certainly did not come to my attention,” Nelson said yesterday, per the Washington Post. “There was no discussion of that whatsoever. Maybe he sent a message to some lower-level person.”

In the conference, Williams was asked about Musk’s wish to deorbit the ISS years ahead of the planned end to the space station in 2030, and told reporters that the station was still in its prime.

“We’ve been up here since sort of the beginning,” Williams responded. “Butch and I had been part of the construction of the space station with the with the shuttle flight. So yeah, we’ve seen it grow from just a couple modules to this amazing laboratory that it is right now. And you know I actually was extremely impressed coming up here and seeing how much science is going on particularly when we have the resupply missions that bring up a lot of science. I mean this place is ticking, it’s it’s just really amazing, so I would say we’re actually in our prime right now.”

Williams went on to stress that the decision affects all nations invested in the ISS.

“We’ve got all the power, all of the facilities up and operating, so I would think that right now is probably not the right time to call it quits,” she said. “We have probably till 2030 in our agreements, and I think that’s probably really accurate because we should make the most of this space station for our taxpayers and for all of our international partners and hold our obligations and do that world-class science that this laboratory is capable of.”

Whether the ISS comes down early remains to be seen, and so far Trump has not weighed in on the topic. And whether or not Musk did make an offer to return them early, or to who, Williams and Wilmore will not be on the station much longer, with plans to return them to Earth on March 19 on board a SpaceX capsule.