The drone footage is absolutely amazing (as compared to any other camera angle from the recovery boat where you would expect to have better quality but was actually awful). I had trouble, for a moment, believing that it was not CGIed.
Is there any information about what drone/camera equipment was used?
There are certain historical inadequacies in the article.
"That is, the Apollo Program brought the country together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country"
This certainly was not 100% true, as some communities protested against Apollo program [1], even though, overall, the progress it has caused helped eventually those communities as well.
Nevertheless there were kind of bipartisan agreement to push this program which, in current situation of the divide in the society, would be hard to achieve, given some program pitfalls, like the tragic catastrophe of Apollo 1, which killed Virgil Grissom, Edward Higgins White and Roger Chaffee (worth to not forget those people, who sacrificed their lives for humanity progress). Kennedy (and his wife) personality helped here a lot too, with some murky person, like Nixon, or someone featureless like Johnson it would've been more difficult.
Also the claim that 1960s were turbulent is not really correct. In fact, 1970s were really turbulent with the rise of domestic terrorism [2][3].
> Nevertheless there were kind of bipartisan agreement to push this program which, in current situation of the divide in the society, would be hard to achieve,
Note that the bipartisanship of the post-WW2, pre-2000s period was almost entirely a product of the long series of overlapping political realignments going on, which left the main political divides in the country poorly aligned with the split between the major parties—there was intense political polarization, and at many times intense political violence, but it wasn't partisan because the splits cut across rather than between the major parties.
> Also the claim that 1960s were turbulent is not really correct. In fact, 1970s were really turbulent with the rise of domestic terrorism
Thr 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were all turbulent, and domestic terrorism (including state and state-tolerated terrorism, particularly around racial issues) was quite prominent in the 1950s; “domestic terrorism” was not unique to the 1970s, though calling domestic political violence “terrorism” may have increased then.
I particularly like how they use `space` in two different ways, from Q-Tip's second verse:
These notions and ideas and citizens live in space
I chuckle just like all of y'all, absurdity, after all
Takes money to get it running and money for trees to fall
Imagine for one second all the people are colored, please
Imagine for one second all the people in poverty
No matter the skin tone, culture or time zone
Think the ones who got it
Would even think to throw you a bone?
Moved you out your neighborhood, did they find you a home?
Nah cypher, probably no place to
Imagine if this shit was really talkin’ about space, dude
While the rich and powerful imagine of blasting off to outer space, advancing the frontiers of humanity, boldly going where no man has gone before -- the poor still find themselves squabbling for just a little space on the planet we all call home. Imagine if 'space program' really meant 'space' program?
Before he took his recent (regrettable) turn he did pour his heart and soul (and personal fortune) into SpaceX for over a decade. If it weren't for SpaceX we'd be relying on the incompetent monstrosities of Boeing or ULA.
He had everything to do with it. If you can't tell by now, he wants to be involved in everything. Recognizing good ideas from bad ones and empowering the right engineers to do it is everything. Look at any of SpaceX's competitors or even other countries space programs to see what poor leadership looks like.
In general, we selectively credit the engineers when a musk company has a success, then blame musk when there's a failure. So when Teslas have quality issues, we don't blame the manufacturing engineers and technicians; instead, we blame Musk who hand assembled every Tesla out there, right?
Yes in some sense, but they did provide additional rides to cover Boeing's shortfall on a short timeline.
The ability to ramp up services on short notice is not flexibility traditional space companies offer. Ex, if NASA begged Boeing for an extra SLS launch this year, they simply could not do it.
Compared to the very first test, everything worked better and looked greased. From the HD drone footage (via Starlink I presume), to the fast arriving boats, quick hypergolic fuel leak checks, roping up, loading onto ship, retrieving crew, going home.
Only thing missing really is landing on land and crew offboarding just like that by themselves.
One thing I'm confused by is that we need to do "reporting" to figure out what the truth is here. Can't we just ask the astronauts, or NASA, or something? Why is there no official statement on the matter?
There's actually a video of Butch, from the station, saying Musk's description was "entirely factual" - although he then sort of backtracked that. Seems like no one wants to outright explain what happened.
Yeah, "no one wants to outright explain what happened" is called "chilling effects" and is one of the explicit goals of an authoritarian regime like the one we have in the US now.
Nobody wants to get fired and get death threats just for speaking plainly, so most people don't. Every once in awhile someone will decide it's worth the cost, but most people most of the time will decide it isn't.
Part of the irony here is that Elon Musk himself seems to be "speaking plainly" and receiving death threats for doing so. But I assume you'd prefer he didn't speak plainly...?
NASA answered a number of direct questions on this during the crew-10 pressers. So they were asked directly. The problem is the Musk claim is that he took the offer directly to the White House, bypassing NASA. From the crew-10 pressers, NASA was completely unaware.
I'd read the Butch quote very carefully:
I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went. That's information that we simply don't have. So I believe him. I don't know all those details, and I don't think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.
He makes it absolutely clear that he can't answer the question because he doesn't have any of the information. But he believes Musk and that what Musk says is "Absolutely factual".
The need for reporting on this stems from the massive blatant lies coming from the admin backed up by the media parroting the narrative. From NASA on Aug 7, 2024:
> Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission. Starliner is expected to depart from the space station and make a safe, controlled autonomous re-entry and landing in early September.
The only change in plan was that Crew 10 was pushed back by a month because of delays at SpaceX and a swap to an existing dragon rather than the new one as planned.
> There's actually a video of Butch, from the station, saying Musk's description was "entirely factual"
His entire career hinges on keeping musk and trump happy
When you have a President that fires, deports, sues, and calls for the impeachment of anyone who challenges him, why on Earth (pun intended) would you take the word of someone whose life is in his hands at face value?
Get on the ground, then tell the truth. The moment Trump politicized those astronauts they became political hostages.
I wasn't very convinced by his arguments - the main one being:
Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.
To be a little snarky here - so Senior NASA officials: honest, Musk: liar?
If, hypothetically, NASA was pressured for political reasons, I don't think Senior NASA officials would reveal it to the public anyway. So the fact that they said it's not for political reasons doesn't really prove anything for either side of the argument.
Just noting 'throne of lies' is a subheading and not in the body of the article. I don't know how Ars Technica does things, but in some news outlets a separate editor have control over titles and subheading rather than the author of the article.
I think the author probably made a mistake in using that subheading. For those familiar with the meme[1] it's saying that this isn't that important but read straight it says the opposite. I'm all for playful subheadings, I love when The Economist uses them, but they shouldn't radically alter the meaning when a big fraction of the audience won't get any particular subtle reference and I think that makes this a failure of writing.
Firstly, I understand people will disagree with me on this and that's fine – if you disagree please just explain why.
Based on what I've read on this, I can see why Trump and Elon MIGHT feel like the return flight was held back for political reasons... But I'm not really able to take either side of this argument as it stands, so I'll give my thoughts for why that is in the hope someone might be able to convince me one way or the other...
Firstly, the assumption that NASA is apolitical should be questioned. This might just be my ignorance, but I still haven't seen any good reasoning for why NASA would delay the return flight. As others have noted the capsule was already there, but NASA seemingly just decided to randomly keep them up there months longer than necessary? Why?
And while it's not fair to blame the Biden administration for this directly, ultimately the actions of any government agency would be the responsibility of the current administration to some extent, so if there was any suspicion that the return flight was being pushed back for political reasons the Biden administration should have intervened.
I imagine if Elon did push for an earlier return and was denied this without a good reason he might have questioned why, and I could imagine someone in that position might assume a political motive – perhaps reasonably depending on those private conversations had.
I also think there's an argument to be made that if the Biden administration was friendlier with Elon and didn't go out of their way to alienate him that this return flight would have happened earlier too. Perhaps because Elon could have spoke to Biden directly as he did with Trump, or because NASA would have changed their calculation on the PR of the return.
I have tried repeatedly to find a reason why the return flight might have been delayed, but haven't been able to find any good reason for this so I'm on the fence about why this might have happened. If someone can give me a reasonable explanation for why they weren't returned earlier (especially if it's a reason Elon would have been aware of) I'd likely conclude Elon is most likely lying.
Either way the argument, "Elon is wrong because the capsule was up there the whole time so they could have been brought back whenever, but NASA just decided to push it back" is not a convincing explanation that there was no political calculation here.
> They liked the "Artemis Program" created by the Trump administration well enough that they simply kept it.
This cannot be overstated. Prior to Biden there was a long history of new administrations of both parties coming in and wanting to make their mark on NASA. Everyone wanted to be what JFK was to the moon race, which meant that whatever the previous guy came up with obviously had to be canned and replaced, so that the new thing would be their thing. NASA was jerked around for decades. You can't do 15 year projects if they're always cancelled after 8 years.
Biden coming in and simply continuing Trump's plan broke the trend. And yet Trump still needed to find a bone to pick to advance his cult of personality.
Just another example of the US government stuffing media and the public and also foreign countries with three outrageous 'things' per day. It's exactly like the quote from a famous movie where Gust Avrakotos says that if you present three scandals in the left hand, you can park an aircraft carrier behind your right hand and nobody will notice.
Claiming the astronauts where stranded by the Biden admin is just one of those things for the left hand. Of course had Kate dared call it the Gulf of Mexico, she'd be in serious trouble only an hour later. Defiantly, without a job two hours later once CEO heard from lower management.
Something any dictator sooner or later gets into serious trouble, because he is only surrounded by obedient people from his bubble. Warping the view of reality. All others fell out a window or best case, got fired.
The decision to make this political and partisan came from the Trump administration, the response to that is obviously political and it is natural that it would come from someone that is not a Trump supporter.
Prior to Musk's shift to the right, Ars ran frequent Musk puff pieces; post shift, they run frequent Musk hit pieces. It's just as grating, and when every other news org is reporting it more measuredly you should be very cautious before calling their summary 'good'. For example, this article claims the political reasons are unspecified, but they were in fact discussed at length (I think Musk even mentioned them on a podcast at the time, though can't remember which one).
The choices were whether to leave them up there longer as the next crew rotation, or let them come home and send up another crew like normal. One would save the government the cost of a new Crew Dragon launch (not insignificant - $100m-150m), and the other would save NASA's valuable astronauts from the long term health effects of a year in space (usually crews are rotated every six months for health reasons, like bone density and muscle mass problems).
NASA reported that the factor keeping them from being brought home was cost, and they didn't have the $100m for a new Dragon launch in the budget. But this was bunk. The next launch was already budgeted for, because this is on a well-planned-for rotation. It could have been because they wanted to keep the $100m, but if they falsely claimed it wasn't budgeted for, then (as Musk postulated) it's a good bet that the real reason is that this would have been a big PR win for Musk, saving America's cherished astronauts from Boeing's massive screwup, and since he had already begun bankrolling Trump's campaign, Biden did not want him to have this PR win.
I think trying to fit things into a dichotomy of puff/hit pieces is actually obscuring the truth here. Eric Berger is a space flight enthusiast and so he covered SpaceX positively when they were doing good work there, but now that Musk seems to be interested only in playing political games rather than running his companies, there isn’t much positive to report: it’s not a hit piece, just the truth many SpaceX fans didn’t want to hear. It’s not a left/right thing (do you know how Boeing’s CEO votes?) but rather Musk having fully embraced the post-modern world of right-wing politics where there’s no such thing as truth which contradicts what the party wants to be true.
> Prior to Musk's shift to the right, Ars ran frequent Musk puff pieces; post shift, they run frequent Musk hit pieces.
You have to go a long way back to find Ars articles on Musk that aren't derogatory. They were ahead of the curve on this, apart from their rocket articles (usually). I've always found it unprofessional and off-putting.
> Prior to Musk's shift to the right, Ars ran frequent Musk puff pieces; post shift, they run frequent Musk hit pieces.
When Musk wasn't insane, I think a lot of people valued him a bit more. I personally haven't cared for him since pedo guy, but others did.
Reality is he's now batshit crazy, destroying America, and intersecting himself in a bunch of shit nobody wants him close to. Of course that has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
It's not a "shift to the right". I don't care of someone is a bit right or a bit left. This man is dangerous, out there setting America back decades, and sending out some hail Hitlers along the way.
> Musk was clear that the reason was that they didn't want someone pro trump having success so close to the election.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The election was in November. If that was their calculation, they’d just have cosplayed astronaut-saving heroes before Trump had an opportunity to do so, between November and January. Musk is full of it, as usual.
It is not the first time some astronauts stay in space longer than expected and it never was controversial before. The people making noise cannot even find a single reason for Biden to do what they accuse him of doing, much less any proof that he did so.
The topic is "crew returns to Earth" not arstechnica's routine political spin.
Does arstechnica mention the dolphins even once? Nope. How about Trump? Six times! Meanwhile, sibling comment applauds the writer for his "knowledge of space topics".
Their opening paragraph immediately attempts to trigger partisan responses. A bit off putting.
Then this line: "NASA—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided the best and safest option"... NASA is part of the executive branch. So yes, it was the Biden administration.
I don't necessarily agree with Musk that the delay was politically motivated, but this article is a political hit piece through and through.
I've heard rumors that SpaceX suggested another mission to bring them back earlier, but as it would only have been a couple of months earlier NASA very sensibly declined (not worth >100 million to reduce their time in space by a third).
> I've heard rumors that SpaceX suggested another mission to bring them back earlier, but as it would only have been a couple of months earlier NASA very sensibly declined (not worth >100 million to reduce their time in space by a third).
I guess it came down to money more than politics? But interestingly that part is missing from reporting about this. Which, if true, reporters hiding that yet saying “let’s not make it political” are making it political. Which sadly is also not surprising.
Today, being a NASA astronaut is kind of a dud job. There are about 50 active astronauts at the moment, and not very many flights for them. Peak was around 150, in the Shuttle era. With 135 Shuttle flights, with up to eight people aboard, most of them got a chance to go up, usually more than once. Not today.
Another astronaut comments on what the Crew-9 people can expect: "The returning astronauts will "struggle to walk, get dizzy easily, and have bad eyesight", because the "build-up of fluid changes the shape of their eyeballs, and weakens their vision". They may need glasses for the rest of their lives."
Living without gravity seems to be harder on some than others. Valery Polyakov spent 435 days in space, longer than anyone else. He apparently didn't suffer much in the way of after-effects, had a good post-flight career, and died at age 80.
Flights to Mars in about 5 years though! I can't imagine how amazing it would be to be one of the first geologists getting out on foot and exploring those canyons, mountains, lava tubes and caves...
I got over it when I learned about the crazy nausea from your inner ears giving your brain conflicting information. Couple that with your body nonstop wasting away in zero gravity, plus the radiation damage. It’s like a never ending hangover, but worse.
We’ll see if they fly again or they are done with space for good. There is no way they’ll publicly complain or acknowledge issues. as it will look unprofessional, but actions will tell.
maybe not on your lifetime but at the speed of current progress, maybe your son or grandchildren can become space settler to terraform mars in the next generation (that literally coolest thing ever)
It's the coolest thing, but it will be frontier work. It won't be a walk in the park, almost certainly neither fun nor safe, and possibly a one-way ticket for a long time. (Even without the "corp-owned slave town" dystopia scenario that's also a possibility.)
Those cheers after the drogue chutes deploy have got to be the best feeling of relief an engineer has ever felt. You can plan, test and validate each others work for years but when it’s finally lives on the line, all you’ve got left while waiting is a wish, hope or prayer everything goes right. Congrats to the SpaceX team and NASA for another successful splashdown.
Readit News
Is there any information about what drone/camera equipment was used?
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https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1902026377685295527
"That is, the Apollo Program brought the country together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country"
This certainly was not 100% true, as some communities protested against Apollo program [1], even though, overall, the progress it has caused helped eventually those communities as well.
Nevertheless there were kind of bipartisan agreement to push this program which, in current situation of the divide in the society, would be hard to achieve, given some program pitfalls, like the tragic catastrophe of Apollo 1, which killed Virgil Grissom, Edward Higgins White and Roger Chaffee (worth to not forget those people, who sacrificed their lives for humanity progress). Kennedy (and his wife) personality helped here a lot too, with some murky person, like Nixon, or someone featureless like Johnson it would've been more difficult.
Also the claim that 1960s were turbulent is not really correct. In fact, 1970s were really turbulent with the rise of domestic terrorism [2][3].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/14/apollo-11-ci...
[2] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OPSR_TP...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
Note that the bipartisanship of the post-WW2, pre-2000s period was almost entirely a product of the long series of overlapping political realignments going on, which left the main political divides in the country poorly aligned with the split between the major parties—there was intense political polarization, and at many times intense political violence, but it wasn't partisan because the splits cut across rather than between the major parties.
> Also the claim that 1960s were turbulent is not really correct. In fact, 1970s were really turbulent with the rise of domestic terrorism
Thr 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were all turbulent, and domestic terrorism (including state and state-tolerated terrorism, particularly around racial issues) was quite prominent in the 1950s; “domestic terrorism” was not unique to the 1970s, though calling domestic political violence “terrorism” may have increased then.
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Under no circumstances will I agree that "Elon rescued" anyone or anything. The guy has a fetish to be seen as a rescuer. It's unseemly.
> SpaceX did awesome Job.
Fulfilling a contract they've executed several times before? slow clap
The ability to ramp up services on short notice is not flexibility traditional space companies offer. Ex, if NASA begged Boeing for an extra SLS launch this year, they simply could not do it.
More than you can say for the Boeing launch that took the astronauts up last summer.
Only thing missing really is landing on land and crew offboarding just like that by themselves.
There's actually a video of Butch, from the station, saying Musk's description was "entirely factual" - although he then sort of backtracked that. Seems like no one wants to outright explain what happened.
Nobody wants to get fired and get death threats just for speaking plainly, so most people don't. Every once in awhile someone will decide it's worth the cost, but most people most of the time will decide it isn't.
There was an election. Someone won. Someone lost. HN is not a place for baseless conspiracy theories. You’ve been here long enough to know better.
Is Trump somehow different here?
I'd read the Butch quote very carefully:
I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went. That's information that we simply don't have. So I believe him. I don't know all those details, and I don't think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.
He makes it absolutely clear that he can't answer the question because he doesn't have any of the information. But he believes Musk and that what Musk says is "Absolutely factual".
> Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission. Starliner is expected to depart from the space station and make a safe, controlled autonomous re-entry and landing in early September.
The only change in plan was that Crew 10 was pushed back by a month because of delays at SpaceX and a swap to an existing dragon rather than the new one as planned.
> There's actually a video of Butch, from the station, saying Musk's description was "entirely factual"
His entire career hinges on keeping musk and trump happy
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-10
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Get on the ground, then tell the truth. The moment Trump politicized those astronauts they became political hostages.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/can-nasa-remain-nonpar...
When he says it’s a “throne of lies”, a line has been crossed.
If, hypothetically, NASA was pressured for political reasons, I don't think Senior NASA officials would reveal it to the public anyway. So the fact that they said it's not for political reasons doesn't really prove anything for either side of the argument.
>Ah, yes. The Gulf of America.
>This is why we can't have nice things.
That doesn't sound like an "excellent journalist". It sounds like a Redditor.
None of the writers of Ars Technica are anything like fair to Musk.
[1]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-sit-on-a-throne-of-lies
>They got left in space
And Musk >They were left up there for political reasons
There was the line already crossed, because those statements are untrue and they know.
In other words they lied.
Based on what I've read on this, I can see why Trump and Elon MIGHT feel like the return flight was held back for political reasons... But I'm not really able to take either side of this argument as it stands, so I'll give my thoughts for why that is in the hope someone might be able to convince me one way or the other...
Firstly, the assumption that NASA is apolitical should be questioned. This might just be my ignorance, but I still haven't seen any good reasoning for why NASA would delay the return flight. As others have noted the capsule was already there, but NASA seemingly just decided to randomly keep them up there months longer than necessary? Why?
And while it's not fair to blame the Biden administration for this directly, ultimately the actions of any government agency would be the responsibility of the current administration to some extent, so if there was any suspicion that the return flight was being pushed back for political reasons the Biden administration should have intervened.
I imagine if Elon did push for an earlier return and was denied this without a good reason he might have questioned why, and I could imagine someone in that position might assume a political motive – perhaps reasonably depending on those private conversations had.
I also think there's an argument to be made that if the Biden administration was friendlier with Elon and didn't go out of their way to alienate him that this return flight would have happened earlier too. Perhaps because Elon could have spoke to Biden directly as he did with Trump, or because NASA would have changed their calculation on the PR of the return.
I have tried repeatedly to find a reason why the return flight might have been delayed, but haven't been able to find any good reason for this so I'm on the fence about why this might have happened. If someone can give me a reasonable explanation for why they weren't returned earlier (especially if it's a reason Elon would have been aware of) I'd likely conclude Elon is most likely lying.
Either way the argument, "Elon is wrong because the capsule was up there the whole time so they could have been brought back whenever, but NASA just decided to push it back" is not a convincing explanation that there was no political calculation here.
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This cannot be overstated. Prior to Biden there was a long history of new administrations of both parties coming in and wanting to make their mark on NASA. Everyone wanted to be what JFK was to the moon race, which meant that whatever the previous guy came up with obviously had to be canned and replaced, so that the new thing would be their thing. NASA was jerked around for decades. You can't do 15 year projects if they're always cancelled after 8 years.
Biden coming in and simply continuing Trump's plan broke the trend. And yet Trump still needed to find a bone to pick to advance his cult of personality.
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Claiming the astronauts where stranded by the Biden admin is just one of those things for the left hand. Of course had Kate dared call it the Gulf of Mexico, she'd be in serious trouble only an hour later. Defiantly, without a job two hours later once CEO heard from lower management.
Something any dictator sooner or later gets into serious trouble, because he is only surrounded by obedient people from his bubble. Warping the view of reality. All others fell out a window or best case, got fired.
What would you have preferred they said?
The choices were whether to leave them up there longer as the next crew rotation, or let them come home and send up another crew like normal. One would save the government the cost of a new Crew Dragon launch (not insignificant - $100m-150m), and the other would save NASA's valuable astronauts from the long term health effects of a year in space (usually crews are rotated every six months for health reasons, like bone density and muscle mass problems).
NASA reported that the factor keeping them from being brought home was cost, and they didn't have the $100m for a new Dragon launch in the budget. But this was bunk. The next launch was already budgeted for, because this is on a well-planned-for rotation. It could have been because they wanted to keep the $100m, but if they falsely claimed it wasn't budgeted for, then (as Musk postulated) it's a good bet that the real reason is that this would have been a big PR win for Musk, saving America's cherished astronauts from Boeing's massive screwup, and since he had already begun bankrolling Trump's campaign, Biden did not want him to have this PR win.
You have to go a long way back to find Ars articles on Musk that aren't derogatory. They were ahead of the curve on this, apart from their rocket articles (usually). I've always found it unprofessional and off-putting.
When Musk wasn't insane, I think a lot of people valued him a bit more. I personally haven't cared for him since pedo guy, but others did.
Reality is he's now batshit crazy, destroying America, and intersecting himself in a bunch of shit nobody wants him close to. Of course that has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
It's not a "shift to the right". I don't care of someone is a bit right or a bit left. This man is dangerous, out there setting America back decades, and sending out some hail Hitlers along the way.
Shift right... Come on.
Bullshit. Musk was clear that the reason was that they didn't want someone pro trump having success so close to the election.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The election was in November. If that was their calculation, they’d just have cosplayed astronaut-saving heroes before Trump had an opportunity to do so, between November and January. Musk is full of it, as usual.
It is not the first time some astronauts stay in space longer than expected and it never was controversial before. The people making noise cannot even find a single reason for Biden to do what they accuse him of doing, much less any proof that he did so.
Does arstechnica mention the dolphins even once? Nope. How about Trump? Six times! Meanwhile, sibling comment applauds the writer for his "knowledge of space topics".
2. Oh look cute dolphins came to watch
…are they dead now?
Then this line: "NASA—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided the best and safest option"... NASA is part of the executive branch. So yes, it was the Biden administration.
I don't necessarily agree with Musk that the delay was politically motivated, but this article is a political hit piece through and through.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411627
Know if there's anything to that?
Might explain some of the odd rhetoric.
I guess it came down to money more than politics? But interestingly that part is missing from reporting about this. Which, if true, reporters hiding that yet saying “let’s not make it political” are making it political. Which sadly is also not surprising.
Maybe one of the downvoters can explain?
Another astronaut comments on what the Crew-9 people can expect: "The returning astronauts will "struggle to walk, get dizzy easily, and have bad eyesight", because the "build-up of fluid changes the shape of their eyeballs, and weakens their vision". They may need glasses for the rest of their lives."
Living without gravity seems to be harder on some than others. Valery Polyakov spent 435 days in space, longer than anyone else. He apparently didn't suffer much in the way of after-effects, had a good post-flight career, and died at age 80.
Contributing to bringing Earth to a state where it will have to be "terraformed" itself: not so cool
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