Musk asserted without supporting data. For “political reasons,” Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of NASA were left stranded on an orbiting outpost
Elon Musk and a Danish astronaut are at odds over the tech billionaire’s assertion that former US President Joe Biden purposefully left two American astronauts on the International Space Station.
When Musk alleged in a Fox News interview with Donald Trump that Biden had left NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded for “political reasons,” Andreas “Andy” Mogensen accused Musk of lying.
The 48-year-old European Space Agency astronaut, who has made two trips to the International Space Station, wrote on X, “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” Musk responded by calling Mogensen “fully retarded,” claiming that SpaceX, his company, could have returned the astronauts “several months ago” and that he had made such an offer to the Biden administration, though he did not specify what that offer included.
In order to validate the new spaceship, Wilmore and Williams travelled to the ISS in June on a Boeing Starliner for an eight-day test flight.
However, NASA decided that the Starliner should return without its crew due to thruster issues, and SpaceX was given the responsibility of sending the veteran astronauts home.
NASA subsequently said that the two will board the spaceship of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which launched in September with a crew of two rather than four to accommodate them.
