Trump, Musk Imply Changes to Butch and Suni’s Return

Posts on social media this evening by President Trump and Elon Musk are raising questions about whether changes are in the works for returning Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth — and presumably the other two members of Crew-9.  The situation is unclear and this article will be updated as more information becomes available. [See update below.]

Musk posted on his social media platform X late this afternoon that Trump (POTUS — President of the United States) directed him to bring “home the 2 astronauts stranded” on the International Space Station as soon as possible and “we will do so.”

The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so.

Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2025

The post was perplexing since no one is stranded on the ISS although some media outlets portray Butch and Suni that way, and SpaceX already is going to bring them back to Earth. Their ride home, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom, is attached to the ISS right now. They can come back anytime, but they are waiting for their Crew-10 replacements.

The ISS has been permanently occupied by international crews rotating on roughly 6-month missions since November 2000. NASA-sponsored crews typically stay until a new NASA-sponsored crew arrives. After a several-day handover period the old crew departs. Crew Dragon typically carries four crew members. Butch and Suni are due to return with NASA’s Nick Hague and Roscosmos’s Aleksandr Gorbunov once Crew-10 is aboard.

That was supposed to happen in February, but Crew-10’s launch was delayed because SpaceX is building a new Crew Dragon capsule and it’s not ready yet. Crew-10’s launch was pushed from February to no earlier than late March because of that delay.

Butch and Suni are indeed staying much longer on the ISS than they planned when they arrived on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test in June 2024, but they have never been stranded in the sense that they couldn’t come home if necessary. NASA and Roscosmos always have enough spacecraft docked at the ISS to bring everyone home in an emergency.

NASA spent weeks assessing Starliner’s propulsion system to determine if it was reliable enough to risk Butch and Suni’s lives. NASA decided it wasn’t. Starliner returned empty and Butch and Suni remained on the ISS and became part of the next regular NASA crew rotation, Crew-9. That meant two of the original Crew-9 members couldn’t fly because Butch and Suni needed their seats, but over the past several months the situation has settled down and they’re completely integrated into Crew-9. Suni is the ISS commander and about to conduct the second of two spacewalks on Thursday. Butch will be Suni’s spacewalk partner.

Butch, Suni, and the other two Crew-9 members, Hague and Gorbunov, are just waiting for SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon to launch Crew-10 so they can come home.

If SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon is going to be further delayed, SpaceX could propose swapping the new capsule for one that’s already operational. There are four: Freedom, currently attached to ISS; Endeavour; Resilience; and Endurance.  SpaceX is getting ready to launch two private astronaut missions, Axiom-4 and Fram2, and presumably could use one of those capsules instead for Crew-10 with little disruption to regular ISS crew rotations.

Musk’s assertion that the Biden Admininstration shouldn’t have left them there is also bewildering. It was NASA’s decision based on astronaut safety and if NASA had decided to bring them back on Starliner — which landed safely — it would have been a boon to Boeing, SpaceX’s competitor in the commercial crew program.

While many in the space community were pondering Musk’s statement, Trump added to the mystery by posting on his own social media platform, Truth Social, implying Musk himself is going to go get them. Musk has never flown in space.

NASA had not responded to SpacePolicyOnline.com queries about what is going on by press time.  UPDATE, January 29:  NASA issued the following statement at 12:19 pm ET, but it does not clarify the situation.

If a decision was made to bring Crew-9 home before Crew-10 launches, that would leave just three people aboard the ISS — NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner — who are using Soyuz MS-26 as their ferry spacecraft. It’s possible to operate ISS with only three crew members as long as there is at least one American and one Russian to operate the interdependent U.S. and Russian segments, but NASA prefers to have a full complement onboard at all times.