After months of safe return Tuesday, the White House characterized the pair as “stuck” and trumpeted their return as a “rescue.” These are the words NASA has resisted for months.
That became awkward situation when NASA administrators insisted they were seeking to be consistent with the president when they insisted they could bring Butch Willmore and Suni Williams home anytime.
The two have returned as part of SpaceX’s Crew 9 mission. I’ve been at the station since June after flying the Boeing Starliner.
“The promise, the promise has been maintained. President Trump has pledged to rescue astronauts bound to space for nine months,” a message posted on his White House X account after the landing.
However, NASA officials have carefully analyzed their words, but have stuck to another story.
“We’ve always had a lifeboat, and it’s the way they get home,” said Steve Stitch, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.
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Wilmore and Williams flew to flight tests for the Starliner crew and arrived on June 6th at what appears to be as short as their eight-day stay. However, Starliner suffered from thruster failure and helium leakage in the propulsion system. NASA was eventually selected to send Starliner home without a crew member and participate in the SpaceX Crew-9 mission by Willmore and Williams.
“We tried to find opportunities to get our crew back when it was safe,” Stitch said.
From Stich’s perspective, what was considered a light-like Wilmore and Williams was part of everything about being an astronaut.
“Looking back at this whole timeframe is that Butch and Suni have been really resilient all along,” he said. “They were seamlessly part of the International Space Station. They had astronauts, so we were preparing, so they did it.”
But for months, the Trump Camp political spin has been moving in a different direction.
SpaceX founder Trump adviser Elon Musk has offered to acquire astronauts during Biden Administration before the time frame that SpaceX has planned for NASA, but claimed that it was rejected for political reasons ahead of the election. After Trump was elected, he said he instructed SpaceX to take it home “as soon as possible.”
Joel Montalvano, assistant deputy administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Bureau, said at a press conference that of course the agency listened to the president.
“NASA is an agency, we work for the president, and anyone there works for them,” Montalvano said. “We gave our opinions from that office. We looked at it. And our job is to get all the input we get and work as successful and safe as possible.
“And that’s what we do for this administration, and that’s what we do for every administration.”
Nonetheless, Musk and subsequent statements from Trump forced an extension of Starliner’s astronauts into a brighter national spotlight. Their words actually came after it was announced in January that Williams and Wilmore would have to stay longer than expected.
Part of that delay was a failure of SpaceX. They were unable to obtain a fifth dragon spaceship that works in time for what was originally targeted as a mid-February exchange flight that allowed astronauts to return home.
This forced NASA and SpaceX to move to another crew dragon. And ultimately, the mask company was able to bring the pair home in mid-March.
Ultimately, Montalvano said politics and public pressure would not affect NASA’s decision.
“Our job at NASA is to put these tasks in place well,” he said. “We skip it with the laws of physics, and fly it with our commercial partners, and there may be something that we often don’t think about exactly what’s going on.”
Musk’s efforts to carry out this issue will bring competitive benefits to his own company. They highlight SpaceX’s abilities while portraying rival Boeing’s Starliner as incompetent. Stich and Montalbano claim that is not the case.
“We’ll also help with the Starliner certification and bring that vehicle back into flight,” Stitch said.
While thanking SpaceX for help bringing astronauts home, he said NASA believes both Starliner and Dragon are necessary as options.
“The return of Butch and Suni’s Dragons demonstrates, for me, the importance of two different crew transport systems, the Starliner, and the redundancy we build for human spaceflight for low-Earth orbital economy,” Stitch said.
He pointed out that Boeing is as enthusiastic as SpaceX as the duo is.
“It shows the flexibility of our commercial providers, the fact that they flew to Boeing cars and SpaceX homes,” Montalvano said. “This is a lesson we’ve learned for NASA too. If both Boeing and SpaceX fly regularly, if you’re out on the SpaceX vehicle and have problems and you’re taking people home to your Boeing vehicle, you need to be able to do the opposite.”
When that might happen, it’s just the question NASA and Boeing are trying to answer.
The biggest problem is solving thruster problems and helium leaks. The spacecraft managed a safe return trip last year, and Stitch said he hopes the team will make a decision on the next flight of Boeing and Space Sex later this summer.
He said Boeing’s next flight could be an undeniable starliner.
“What we want to do is to go on a one flight and then go on a rotation flight for the crew,” Stitch said. “So the next flight really needs to test every change we made to the vehicle and then, beyond that, we need to make Boeing a crew rotation. That’s kind of strategy.”
NASA is considering a Boeing contract to see what the company can do to treat the mission as a post-certified flight. This means one of six operational flights awarded as part of a $4.6 billion worth of contract Starliner has not yet collected. Boeing has reported more than $2 billion in losses on its program by 2024.
Starliner is more than five years behind SpaceX under the commercial crew program. They won a contract in 2014, but SpaceX made its first crew test flight to the station in May 2020, flying 62 humans across a fleet of four crew dragons.
But Stitch said he was sure Boeing wouldn’t throw a Starliner towel.
“They realized they had important vehicles and we were very close to having the abilities we wanted to make into the field,” he said.
Original issue: March 19, 2025, 3:35pm EDT
