“What a long, strange trip it’s been” were words of a Grateful Dead song, but those lyrics may have been on the minds of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore when they finally returned to Earth last month.
What was to have been a short space trip turned into a 21st century space odyssey lasting over nine months after their Boeing-built Starliner spacecraft malfunctioned and was brought home automatically—minus its crew. The two astronauts returned to Earth aboard a capsule built by SpaceX, the company owned by Donald Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who will get even richer with billions of dollars in federal contracts, according to news reports released by The New York Times on Mar. 25.
Williams and Wilmore returned to Earth with fellow fliers Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov, who had also spent time in orbit aboard the International Space Station that has hosted a series of human crews for over 25 years. After a meteoric re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the astronauts’ spacecraft parachuted gently into the Gulf of Mexico. As the otherworldly craft bobbed in the water, a friendly pod of dolphins cavorted near the spaceship before recovery vessels arrived to welcome home the weary travellers.
It didn’t take long for earthly politics to sully the happy ending to a space saga. The same Donald Trump who laughably and lamentably changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America claimed that his predecessor, President Joe Biden, “was going to leave them in space.” Musk said, “They were left up there for political reasons,” though it was never explained how Biden would gain by leaving spacefarers stuck in orbit. Wilmore himself said, “Politics is not playing into this at all.” Still, Trump, Musk and their right-wing media minions continue to blame the Democrats for the astronauts’ plight, even though the strategy for their return home was approved by the Biden administration last September, two months before the 2024 election.
Other astronauts challenged Musk on the billionaire’s own X social media site. Andreas Mogensen bristled at Musk’s suggestion that political chicanery delayed the return of Williams and Wilmore. “What a lie,” he posted. “And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” In response, Musk haughtily huffed that Mogensen was “fully retarded” and an “idiot.”
Retired astronaut Scott Kelly—who spent nearly a year in space himself—defended Mogensen, calling him “competent, trustworthy and honest.” In a response showing that competence, trustworthiness and honesty are in short supply in the White House today, Musk posted insults about both Scott Kelly and his brother, former astronaut Mark Kelly, now a senator from Arizona. Firing back at the billionaire and underlining his defense of his brother Mark and his fellow flier Mogensen, Scott suggested, “Hey @Elon Musk, when you finally get the nerve to climb into a rocketship, come talk to the three of us.”
Many wish that Musk would take a one-way rocket ride. Though his Falcon rockets that take crews to the space station are very reliable, the same cannot be said for the billionaire’s vaunted Starship vehicle. That rocket is twice as powerful as the Saturn V moon rocket, but Starship in eight test launches has yet to prove as dependable as the Saturn V, which was successful in all its 13 launches in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Saturn V did its job with only five engines. Starship uses more than 30 engines, tempting Murphy’s Law, which says that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Musk seems hellbent on controlling Earth while colonizing Mars. A round trip to Mars could take at least two years, while the longest human spaceflight so far was a 14-month Earth-orbiting trip by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov 30 years ago. Exploring Mars with automatic robot spacecraft is less risky and costly than sending humans there, but that wouldn’t be as profitable for mogul Musk.
Men like Musk and Trump would do well to remember the words of the first man in space, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who said, “I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”
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