The Starliner Astronauts Are Now Safely Back on Earth, but Did Elon Musk Save Them?

Throughout his career as a public figure, Elon Musk has, on more than one occasion, gone out of his way to insert himself into a crisis. When a Thai soccer team got stuck in a cave, he was there trying to prove that he could solve the problem (he didn't). It seems a similar thing has happened with the astronauts who were stranded at the International Space Station for nine months.

Thankfully, those astronauts have now successfully returned to Earth, but in the aftermath of their return, many wanted to know whether Elon Musk was responsible for getting them out. Here's what we know.

Not directly. There are some ways you could argue that Elon Musk is responsible for the rescue of the Starlink astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. His company SpaceX did provide the shuttle that brought them home.

What's not true, though, is that Musk had any direct role in returning them to safety. SpaceX engineers coordinated with NASA on their rescue, and that plan was underway for months before the 2024 election.

President Trump has also tried to take credit for the return of the astronauts, writing on the official White House X (formerly Twitter) account: "PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months."

The plan to get the astronauts home had been in motion since September, well before the presidential election, but both Trump and Musk wanted to take credit for the astronaut's return, and there are likely people who believe they are responsible.

The reality is that teams of engineers and astronauts at NASA and SpaceX worked for months to carefully coordinate a plan that would get the astronauts home.

Trump claimed that he "authorized" the return of the astronauts and that he put Musk in charge of the effort. He also claimed that Joe Biden was embarrassed that the astronauts had been stranded up there, and decided to "leave them."

The reality, though, is that NASA had always planned to get the astronauts home, and while it took nine months for that to happen, there was no period where the agency was not actively planning a way to get both Wilmore and Williams home.

In spite of Trump's assertion that the astronauts were "stranded," both Wilmore and Williams have repeatedly attempted to dispel notions that they were left in space to rot.

"We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded," Wilmore told Anderson Cooper in February. He also made it clear that he doesn't think politics was involved in their rescue.

"The words they said, well, that’s politics. I mean, that’s part of life," Wilmore said earlier this month when he appeared at the station for a March 4 news conference. "From my standpoint, politics has not played into this at all."

What's most important, though, is that the astronauts are home, and every part of their return went as planned.