Astronauts Who Have Been in Space for 8 Months Push Back on Trump’s Claim They Were 'Abandoned'

Mar. 15, 2025

A handout picture made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on 24 August 2024 shows NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts (from top) Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams posing for a portrait inside the vestibule between the forward port on the International Space Station’s Harmony module and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on 13 June 2024. NASA announced on 24 August that it will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft. The Starliner is expected to depart from the space station and make a ‘controlled autonomous re-entry and landing’ in early September. The agency said the uncrewed return will allow it and Boeing to continue gathering testing data on Starliner during its upcoming flight home. Wilmore and Williams flew to the ISS in June aboard NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test. The two astronauts will continue their work as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025 and fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission, NASA added.

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“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck," Butch Wilmore said while speaking withCNN’sAnderson Cooperfrom the International Space Station on Thursday, Feb. 13.

“But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about,” he continued. “We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”

Although Wimore admitted that he understood “why others may think that,” he said that they came to space prepared “for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of.”

“We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded,” the astronaut continued. “If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed.’ That’s what we prefer.”

Wilmore and Williams’ expected return following their June 2024 test flight of the Starliner was delayed after their spacecraft encounteredmechanical issues. After weeks of troubleshooting, the spacecraft was sent back to Earthwithout them— and since then, their return home has continually been pushed back.

“Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long,” Musk wrote in a social media response posted on X, the social media platform he owns, going on to note that SpaceX would be bringing them home “as soon as possible.”

However, despite their remarks,NASA had already been collaborating with SpaceX for monthson a plan to bring the astronauts home — and in December, NASA said they planned to bring the astronauts home “no earlier than late March," which would allow them time to prepare a new SpaceX capsule.

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Earlier this month NASA announced that the space agency and SpaceX havesped upthe planned launch and return dates for the upcoming crew rotation missions.

“The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements,” the agency added.

PEOPLE contacted the White House for comment on Wednesday, Feb. 19.

During the astronauts’ recent CNN interview from space, Williams said that both she and Wilmore were doing “pretty darn good.”

“We got food, we got clothes,” she told Cooper. “We got great crew members up here. Of course, it’s been a longer stay than we expected, but both of us have trained to live and work on the International Space Station and I think we made the most of it."

source: people.com

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