No One At NASA Heard Of Musk's Offer To Bring Stranded Astronauts Home

Elon Musk got in a spat with an astronaut on Twitter X last month that led to the world's richest man calling a former International Space Station commander slurs and arguing that the whole station should be splashed into the ocean as soon as possible. The whole disagreement was prompted by a Hannity interview with President Trump and Musk, during which the latter claimed that the stranded Starliner astronauts were only still aboard the ISS for "political reasons" — in the tweets, Musk went on to claim that he'd offered the Biden administration a plan to bring them home, only to be shot down.

There's just one problem with Musk's claim: No one in any decision-making capacity at NASA heard such a proposal. The Washington Post spoke with both the Starliner crew and the former NASA administrator who directed decision-making around the astronauts' rescue, and all three confirmed they'd never heard of Musk's supposed offer — Astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore, in a press conference, said, "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."

It's possible Musk did offer the Biden administration a solution so unworkable that it was never run up the NASA chain to any real decision-makers. It wouldn't be the first time Musk has offered a "solution" that doesn't work and resorted to barely-not-defamatory name-calling when he didn't get to save the day. Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson suggested that this may well have been what happened, ruling out an emergency Dragon launch by telling WaPo "We didn't have the money to bring an additional Dragon to go up just for them, but we had another rotation coming up fairly soon." Yet, despite giving Musk that out, Nelson confirmed that any proposal from the billionaire "certainly did not come to [his] attention" — there was nothing for him to turn down.

It's entirely possible Musk is just making things up on Twitter, as he is wont to do, but it's equally possible that he DM'ed some NASA intern while on a bender to suggest some hairbrained bar-napkin scheme. Either way, no one in power at NASA — or stranded aboard the ISS — heard a whisper from Musk, let alone anything they could turn down out of some political agenda.