XPost: aus.politics, sci.space.history, alt.atheism
XPost: sac.politics, talk.politics.guns
In <vrkn5a$2es3q$
1@dont-email.me> sheepshagger wrote:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14518515/elon-musk-saved-nasa- astronauts-spacex.html
Elon Musk's Space X safely brought stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore
and Suni Williams back down to earth on Tuesday, marking a triumphant conclusion to an eight-day voyage that overran some nine months.
The reaction was jubilant. The astronauts were taken back to Houston for health checks, and NASA confirmed they were 'doing great'. Photographs
from Tallahassee showed their pair smiling in stretchers as crews helped
them back to dry land.
Wilmore and Williams spent 286 days stranded in space after propulsion
issues with their Boeing Starliner craft upended what was supposed to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.
In a viral clip shared by Elon Musk, the pair took the time to thank the SpaceX boss and President Donald Trump for organising the rescue mission.
'All of us have the utmost respect for Mr Musk and obviously respect and admiration for the President of the United States, Donald Trump,'
Wilmore said.
'We appreciate them, we appreciate all that they do for us, for human spaceflight, for our nation. And we are thankful that they are in the positions that they are in.'
The story has become a political lightning rod, with President Trump and
his close advisor, Elon Musk - who leads SpaceX - repeatedly suggesting former president Joe Biden abandoned the astronauts and refused an earlier rescue plan.
But amid mounting backlash against Trump's cost-cutting tsar over his role
in American politics, praise for SpaceX's rescue mission remains muted.
Judging that Musk's politicking had 'poisoned' his business empire, and connecting the recent slump in Tesla value, a guest author for the New
York Times offered the damning assessment: 'So what if Elon Musk rescued
the astronauts?'
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy
test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission.
But issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its
crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.
On Tuesday morning, the pair strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph to a soft 17
mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 p.m. ET some 50 miles off
Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies.
'What a ride,' NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander
inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing
down.
'I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear.'
Wilmore and Williams logged 286 days in space on the mission.
The long-awaited return adopted a political bent after capturing the attention of President Trump, who upon taking office in January called for
a quicker return of the astronauts and alleged, without evidence, that
former President Joe Biden 'abandoned' them on the ISS for political
reasons.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft.
Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, now a close advisor to Trump, had echoed the President's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA acted on Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said Tuesday.
The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be
ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president's call.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft used in the rescue is the only U.S. spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit.
Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before
the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
The success of SpaceX's mission was inevitably championed by Elon Musk,
who took to his own platform, X, to sing its praises.
'Congratulations to the SpaceX and NASA teams for another safe astronaut return!
'Thank you to POTUS for prioritizing this mission!'
The post had been seen 54 million times at the time of writing, shared
57,000 times and liked by 375,000.
Users noted that NASA had decided to bring the crew home with the SpaceX Crew-9 mission early this year, announced in an August press release published when Biden was president.
'Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025,' the release said
'They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency's SpaceX Crew-9 mission.'
Starliner, unfit to carry them home, would depart without them and make a controlled re-entry and landing in September 2024.
It was not clear how much faster they returned as a result of the Trump administration's demands to NASA.
While Trump heralded Musk's 'genius' in the recovery, there was muted
praise for Elon Musk in the media.
The New York Times went so far as to lead with an opinion piece entitled,
'So What if Elon Musk Rescued the Astronauts?'
Clive Irving wrote in the article that Musk's Tesla had become a 'poisoned brand' amid his 'turn to the hard right', noting the collapse in share
price.
Who is Clive Irving? Just another pretend journalist snot bucket from the teetering NYT garbage heap.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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