After nine months orbiting the land due to the problems of the Starliner of Boeing, American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are ready to return home in a ship operated by Spacex.
It was at the end of August when NASA decided that both would remain at the International Space Station until the next rotation of crew members in early 2025, but that everything goes as planned has not prevented its return from being fogged by political controversies.
The context. Wilmore and Williams were thrown into space in June 2024 as part of a test mission to standardize the Starliner ship, which Boeing and NASA expected to start using for regular astronaut transport to the ISS, as Spacex does from 2020.
The mission was going to last only 10 days, but the helium leaks and the failures in the propulsion of the Starliner forced to prolong the stay of the astronauts until NASA decided that the ship returned empty and its crew stays in the ISS waiting for the return of the Spacex Crew-9 mission.
After nine months of experiments in microgravity and space walks to perform maintenance tasks, Wilmore and Williams have a return date: March 19; A few days after the crew members of the CREW-10 mission, whose launch is scheduled for March 12, arrive at the station.
The controversy. The decision that NASA made at the time seemed purely technical: prioritizing the safety of its astronauts forcing Boeing to exorbit the Starliner without its occupants to, then, launch the CREW-9 mission with two empty seats for the return of the “stranded” astronauts in the ISS.
However, there is another version of the facts. Elon Musk has been in charge of disseminating that it was not a technical decision, but a political decision, taken by the government of Joe Biden before Donald Trump was invested president of the United States. Musk offered to send an additional Crew Dragon ship to bring astronauts as soon as possible, but the White House refused, according to the businessman. “For political reasons.”
The controversy, fueled by the accusations of Musk and Trump himself in different interviews, intensified with a crossing of hostile statements between Musk and the European astronaut Andreas Mogensen, who publicly accused Musk of lying, which caused a particularly aggressive reaction from the founder of Spacex. He said: “You are a complete mental retardation.”
The script rotation. Although Elon Musk’s statements were refuted by NASA, Butch Wilmore and his family have put another possibility on the table: that Musk is right. In a recent press conference since the ISS, the astronaut gave credibility to the Musk version stating that the businessman had been “absolutely factual.” Although he also clarified not to know the exact details of the decision process.
He added more firewood to his daughter Daryn in a video uploaded to a social network in which she declared to be very frustrated with the situation: “There is a lot of politics, there are many things that I have no freedom to say and that I do not know fully. But there have been problems. There has been negligence. And that is the reason why this has continued to delay. There has been a problem after another.”
What does NASA say. Nasa’s senior officials, such as Ken Bowersox and Steve Stich, reiterated that the extended stay of astronauts was motivated only by technical and operational reasons, related to the safety and logistics of the International Space Station.
Spacex offered alternatives to the official plan in 2024, admitted the officials, but were rejected not by political motivations, but by budgetary and technical considerations that prioritized the operational continuity of the ISS, they sentenced.
As an end point, NASA has published a summary of everything Wilmore and Williams have done these nine months with their colleagues in the CREW-9 mission: more than 900 hours dedicated to key scientific research on biomanuffing, space agriculture, advanced exercise systems and studies on microorganisms in microgravity.
Images | POT
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