Starliner crew says they were unaware of any Musk offer for earlier return

A former NASA administrator and a pair of astronauts aboard the International Space Station said Tuesday that they had no knowledge of any offer from SpaceX that would have returned the agency’s astronauts to Earth last year - adding another twist to the saga of the astronauts stuck in space for eight months.

The statements sowed further confusion around SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s claims that he told someone in the Biden administration he could get the astronauts home earlier but that the administration turned down the offer for political reasons. President Donald Trump has joined Musk in politicizing the issue.

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams arrived at the space station on June 6 aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule, with plans to stay there about a week. But Starliner experienced helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters on its way there, prompting NASA to extend their stay. Ultimately NASA decided that Starliner was not safe enough to fly them home and that it would rely on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule instead. The astronauts are now scheduled to return later this month, nearly nine months after they blasted off.

Musk and Trump said last month in an interview with Sean Hannity that the astronauts had been kept aboard the space station for political reasons, and Musk later said in a social media post that the Biden administration had turned down an offer to have SpaceX bring them back.

“SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused,” Musk wrote.

If so, such an offer never reached the space station, the astronauts said. In a news conference from the ISS on Tuesday, the two astronauts brushed off questions about the politics surrounding their extended stay, saying they had been prepared for a possible change of plans.

Wilmore said, however, that he and Williams had received “no information” on any offer to bring them home sooner. “What was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that process went - that’s information that we simply don’t have,” he said.

Bill Nelson, who served as NASA administrator when key decisions were being made about Wilmore and Williams’s mission, also said that any offer by Musk never reached his office. He said the top leadership at the space agency spent weeks trying to figure out the safest way to bring them home, ultimately deciding that SpaceX’s Dragon was a better option than Boeing’s Starliner. Nelson added that an early return was never discussed by him, his deputy or the heads of the agency’s human spaceflight division.

“It certainly did not come to my attention,” Nelson said Tuesday. “There was no discussion of that whatsoever. Maybe he [Elon Musk] sent a message to some lower-level person.”

Funding issues were also a factor, Nelson said, as sending another spaceship appeared less practical than simply reserving seats on a return trip that was already scheduled.

“We didn’t have the money to bring an additional Dragon to go up just for them, but we had another rotation coming up fairly soon,” he said.

Nelson’s comments echoed what former deputy NASA administrator Pam Melroy recently told Bloomberg News: “An offer to bring the crew home early, it never came to headquarters.”

The Starliner crew was initially supposed to return to Earth in February. But that was delayed to late March because of a problem with a new capsule that SpaceX intended to use to fly the next set of astronauts, known as Crew-10.

In a blog post in December, NASA said that “the change gives NASA and SpaceX teams time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission.”

In February, however, NASA announced that it was “accelerating the target launch and return dates for the upcoming crew rotation missions” by swapping out the new Dragon capsule originally slated to fly Crew-10 to the station for one that had previously flown before.

“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is enabled by the tremendous partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,” said Steve Stich, who oversees NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.