A Meticulous Breakdown of Trump’s Desperate Attempt to Take Credit for the Starliner Crew’s Return

The Starliner saga is finally coming to an end with the return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on Tuesday after a prolonged nine month stay in space. The story is largely over, but that didn’t prevent President Donald Trump from taking one final stab at the former administration—a stab packed with disinformation, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods.

Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social on Monday to once again take credit for the plan to bring the Starliner astronauts back home. The NASA duo, Wilmore and Williams, launched to the International Space Station on board Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on June 5, 2024. The mission was supposed to last for eight days but NASA declared Starliner unsafe in the wake of alarming technical issues. The spacecraft returned home empty, with Wilmore and Williams assigned a pair of seats aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which finally undocked from the ISS on Tuesday, March 18 at 1:05 a.m. ET.

Trump is disingenuously claiming to have facilitated a rescue mission to bring the astronauts home, accusing the Biden administration of having “abandoned” them. The president’s latest social media diatribe on the return of Crew-9, posted to Truth Social on Monday, is a doozy, filled with nonsensical claims and glaring inaccuracies. We went through Trump’s post, fact-checking the president’s various claims and providing background and context to reveal the true story. The president opens:

I just spoke with the Acting Administrator of NASA, Janet Petro. She is coordinating our Team of highly respected Scientists, Space Engineers, and various other “geniuses,” who has agreed to let our Astronauts come home long prior to the two week period originally approved by NASA.

As the newly appointed acting administrator for NASA, we seriously doubt that Janet Petro had much to do with this routine SpaceX mission. If anything, she’s being a dutiful stooge, hard at work dismantling the space agency from the inside at her president’s behest. Trump pretends to respect the space agency’s “Scientists, Space Engineers, and various other ‘geniuses’” even as Petro carries out his executive orders—closing multiple offices, laying off staff, and likely preparing for even more cuts. With Petro as the acting administrator, NASA has paused the work of a number of astrophysics and planetary science committees and removed references to key terms, including references to women in leadership, from its websites.

Again, as a routine SpaceX mission, NASA’s involvement is minimal, and it’s unclear which “geniuses” at the space agency supposedly played a role in the return. And on that note, putting “geniuses” in quotes distinctly feels like some kind of backhanded burn.

That Trump also “just spoke” with Petro, and that she agreed to “let our astronauts come home,” is yet another sick joke. This plan has been in the works since August of last year. On September 28, 2024, NASA launched its Crew-9 mission with two astronauts instead of the usual four (the two being NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov). The two empty seats were reserved for Williams and Wilmore, who became active and contributing members of Crew-9—even performing spacewalks that, for Williams, resulted in a new record.

Trump added that his so-called rescue mission is bringing the astronauts home “long prior to the two week period originally approved by NASA.” The astronauts are indeed returning home two weeks earlier than planned—at the insistence of Trump—but what does this even mean? Long prior?

Regardless, Trump may be referring to technical issues with the SpaceX Crew Dragon that delayed the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission. That meant Crew-9, along with Williams and Wilmore, couldn’t depart the ISS until Crew-10 arrived at the station sometime in April. NASA ended up switching the Dragon vehicle assigned to Crew-10, launching the mission on March 12 and returning the Crew-9 mission on March 17 after a brief handover period. Technically, that did save the crew an additional two-week period or so on board the ISS, but for astronauts who had been in space for more than nine months, an extra two weeks wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Trump added:

Janet was great. She said, “Let’s bring them home NOW, Sir!” — And I thanked her.

Again, this sense of an urgent call to bring two astronauts back to Earth is pure fiction. The Starliner crew was never in need of a rescue mission—a Crew Dragon spacecraft—the one that launched in September—has been parked outside the ISS this entire time! The crew could have left the station at any point since September. However, doing so would have been incredibly wasteful, as the other Crew-9 astronauts would have had to join them for the return trip. Six month stints aboard the ISS are standard.

Instead, Williams and Wilmore, as bona fide and fully trained NASA astronauts, were more than willing to assume the responsibilities of the two astronauts who weren’t able to make the trip. This made sense for so many reasons—not least of which is the enormous cost of launching astronauts to the ISS. It’s also worth noting that at no point did Wilmore or Williams say they were “abandoned” or hard done by the situation. Trump, however, is seemingly wanting to live out his doomsday film fantasy. More from Trump:

This began when I asked Elon Musk to go up and get the abandoned Astronauts, because the Biden Administration was incapable of doing so. They shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be a very embarrassing event for them – Another thing I inherited from that failed group of incompetents.

The plan to bring the Starliner crew home most certainly did not begin with Trump calling on his buddy Musk, CEO and owner of SpaceX, to retrieve the abandoned astronauts. In February, Musk claimed that he had offered the Biden administration a plan to bring the two Starliner astronauts back sooner, without waiting for the Crew-9 mission to return from the ISS. Musk has provided no evidence to back this claim.

This Starliner mission was the first crewed flight of Boeing’s program to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. It’s a private test flight, funded by NASA, with the space agency relying on a commercial partner for its spaceflight endeavors. And yet we have Trump dumping on the former administration, and not Boeing, for this epic, embarrassing fail. More from the president’s post:

Elon and I have taken on the project, sending up the SpaceX Dragon, which has successfully docked and, hopefully, while there is always danger involved in such a mission, they will soon be on their way home — Taking off tomorrow, and landing on Wednesday. Exact times will be provided to you. Safety always comes first, and maximum standards are being adhered to.

This “project” of which Trump speaks is most certainly not of his or Musk’s doing, as the plan has been in place for months. And as noted, his only contribution was to expedite the return home by about two weeks. In reality, this is Trumpian political theater and an opportunity to cast unwarranted shade onto the former administration.

Trump also attempted to heighten the drama of his so-called rescue mission by emphasizing “danger,” even though these types of crew missions to the ISS have long been routine. Yes, there is always risk when it comes to spaceflight, but there’s nothing unique about this mission. Also, it’s landing on Tuesday. Trump closed his post by saying:

But after eight long months for a mission that was supposed to be eight days, IT IS TIME. I look forward to seeing Butch and Suni, and thank you again to NASA and Janet Petro!

Trump is, and will continue to be, claiming that he rescued the Starliner astronauts, but the duo is unlikely to play into the president’s ploy to politicize the mission. “The words they said, well, that’s politics. I mean, that’s part of life,” Wilmore told reporters during a recent live webcast from the ISS. “From my standpoint, politics has not played into this at all.”

There you have it—straight from the astronaut’s mouth. But that won’t stop Trump from seizing on Boeing’s troubled Starliner program as yet another way to take shots at his predecessor.