After astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams finally landed back on Earth in the spring of 2025 — following a nine-month space odyssey that was meant to last little more than a week — rumors continued to spread that former U.S. President Joe Biden had chosen to leave them stranded in orbit and refused help from Elon Musk's SpaceX to bring them home.
The first crewed test flight for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft launched on June 5, 2024, during Biden's administration. Since Trump's second term began in January 2025, he and his adviser Musk repeatedly claimed that after the capsule malfunctioned, Biden abandoned Williams and Wilmore and did not instruct NASA, the federal space agency, to bring them back. Musk also said the former president had declined the tech mogul's offer to retrieve the astronauts earlier.
Social media users on various sites, including Musk's social media platform X and TikTok and Instagram, spread the rumor. In April, weeks after the astronauts returned, one X user responded to an interview Wilmore gave – in which he said he watched church services every week while in space – by writing: "Biden Abandoned the USA Astronauts in Space."
Wilmore's daughter, Daryn Wilmore, broached the subject on TikTok, saying the delay to her dad's return was linked to "a lot of politics" and "negligence," but she couldn't say more because she didn't "know fully" what happened.
Snopes readers wrote in to ask whether posts about these claims were true.
Evidence suggests that — contrary to Trump's and Musk's assertions that they were responsible for finally retrieving the astronauts — NASA was discussing how to facilitate the Starliner crew's return as early as August 2024, and that the SpaceX capsule that brought them back was not only docked at the ISS by September 2024 but scheduled for an early 2025 return. We could find no documented proof to corroborate Musk's claim that he offered to rescue the astronauts earlier.
In lieu of answering detailed questions, a NASA spokesperson, Joshua Finch, sent links to two of the agency's hourlong news conferences. In the first, on March 14, a reporter asked if NASA leadership could give "any clarity" on "claims that the previous administration refused to bring home the Starliner astronauts despite an offer being made." NASA's space operations associate administrator, Kenneth Bowersox, replied that he could not give "a lot of clarity there."
"Those discussions, I wasn't part of, so I can't tell you if they did happen or didn't happen," Bowersox said (see 35:31). "All I can tell you is NASA is an incredible nonpartisan agency. We get support from whoever is in office. Our presidents always care a lot about what happens at NASA, and it's great to see that trend continue with our current president."
Musk, SpaceX and Trump did not immediately return requests for comment. It was not possible to reach Biden; inquiries left with former Vice President Kamala Harris' office were not returned as of this writing.
Here is a rundown of how the astronauts' long-beleaguered stay on the ISS – and the mission to rescue them – developed over the course of two presidencies.
'SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago'
Trump, on his social media platform Truth Social, claimed in a March 17, 2025, post that he brought the astronauts home "long prior to the two week period originally approved by NASA," and that efforts to bring them home began when he asked Musk to "go up and get the abandoned astronauts because the Biden Administration was incapable of doing so." (Trump appeared to be referencing a prior timeline to bring the astronauts home a month later, although it is not entirely clear.)
(Truth Social @realDonaldTrump)
It was the latest in a string of claims from him (see 44:31) and Musk that they had "taken on the project" of bringing Williams and Wilmore home.
Musk has repeatedly claimed SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back under the Biden administration — but was rejected for "political reasons" because they didn't want to make him, as a Trump supporter, "look good." For example, see his Feb. 20, 2025, comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference (see 26:13) and his Feb. 28 comments on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (see 1:23:34).
Musk even got into a spat on Feb. 20 with a Danish astronaut, Andreas Mogensen, about this claim after Mogensen accused Musk of lying during a Feb. 19 Fox News interview, in which Musk and Trump both claim the astronauts were left in space by Biden (see 14:53).
In response to Morgensen, Musk said "SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons."
Timeline doesn't add up with Trump and Musk's claims
Despite Trump's and Musk's claims that they were responsible for setting a rescue plan in motion, documentation from NASA reveals that the plan to get Williams and Wilmore home had been in discussion as early as August 2024.
Starliner's technical problems began before its liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, but it was the issues it encountered before even docking at the ISS on June 6 that forced Williams and Wilmore to stay at the ISS. At first, NASA announced a steady stream of delays to the Starliner crew's return via teleconferences and news releases. The space agency cited the need to review technical issues, avoid other preplanned ISS spacewalks, or conduct additional testing (see 4:59).
By Aug. 7, NASA officials acknowledged in a news conference that the Starliner crew may need to come home on a different spacecraft and discussed leaving two empty seats on the upcoming launch of the Dragon spacecraft – which was built by SpaceX and assigned to NASA's Crew-9 mission. Bowersox, NASA's space operations administrator, said (see 7:47):
Our decision-making process at NASA can run really fast or it can take a while. What you find is that the speed of the decision can vary with the clarity of the information you're working with, the amount of uncertainty in the problem, the time that you have available, and the number of options that you have to deal with issues. If you talk Starliner in particular, we're in a – kind of a new situation here in that we've got multiple options. We don't just have to bring a crew back on Starliner, for example, we could bring them back on another vehicle.
On Aug. 24, NASA announced Boeing's Starliner would return to Earth without Williams and Wilmore, and that the two astronauts would instead fly home aboard the SpaceX Dragon Crew-9 capsule. "The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring Boeing's Starliner home uncrewed is the result of our commitment to safety: our core value and our North Star," said then-NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
The SpaceX Crew-9 tasked with bringing Williams and Wilmore home docked at the ISS on Sept. 29, 2024 – months before Trump supposedly entrusted Musk with the rescue mission. It was stated in the original announcement that Williams and Wilmore would stay at the ISS to "continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025," suggesting that it was a long-standing plan for the Starliner crew to fly back home in early 2025. (NASA took advantage of the extended time in space, asking astronauts to complete various experiments and research, including on stem cell technology, lighting systems and sleep rhythms.) Indeed, NASA's descriptions of Expedition 71 and Expedition 72 show that they were planned to run consecutively, the first from April 5, 2024, until Sept. 23, 2024, and the second from Sept. 23, 2024, until "Spring 2025."
"If I step back to last year, this has been nine months in the making," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager, during a March 18 news conference on the astronauts' return (see 8:30).
What NASA and its astronauts have said
In a series of interviews from space, Wiliams and Wilmore addressed the rumors about their situation. In February 2025, CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper asked them if — as Trump had asserted — they had been "abandoned" by Biden (see 03:34, or archived here). Wilmore responded:
We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded. I understand why others may think that. We come prepared, we come committed [...] So, if you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let's change it to prepared and committed.
A little more than two weeks before their flight home, Williams and Wilmore held an "in-orbit" news conference in which they fielded questions as to whether it was true Musk had offered to bring them back earlier. Wilmore said, "From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all" in response to a question about the timing of his return. When a Washington Post reporter asked again whether it was true Musk offered an earlier return, Wilmore appeared to contradict himself:
I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual. I have no – we have no information on that though, whatsoever. What was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how [those] processes 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 can really give you the answer that maybe you would be hoping for.
His comments suggest that he had no official proof that Musk had offered to bring them home earlier, or that Biden had refused that offer for any reason. A reporter for The Times of London alluded to some of these unfounded claims in NASA's March 18 news conference, asking why the organization had not "pushed back more emphatically" against a "fictitious narrative" surrounding the mission and "against the use of astronauts by one of its commercial contractors as political pawns."
"Oftentimes, there may be things out in the press that may not be exactly what's happening," replied Joel Montalbano, a deputy associate administrator at NASA (see 51:47). "Our job is to fly these missions, and regardless of what you read in the press, our job is to fly successful missions, safe missions, and do the science we do onboard the International Space Station."
However, NASA's acting administrator, Janet Petro, whom Trump appointed to the role in January, said in a statement shortly after the astronauts' splash-landing off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, that "per President Trump's direction, NASA and SpaceX worked diligently to pull the schedule a month earlier."
"This international crew and our teams on the ground embraced the Trump Administration's challenge of an updated, and somewhat unique, mission plan, to bring our crew home," she added.
On March 31, 2025 — around two weeks after Williams and Wilmore landed — Williams and Wilmore sat down for an interview with Bill Hemmer, co-anchor of Fox News' "America's Newsroom" show. Referencing their February interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, in which Wilmore had said they did not feel "abandoned," "stuck" or "stranded," Hemmer then asked if they had been "marooned" (see 08:40). Wilmore reiterated that they did not feel abandoned and even went as far as to take some responsibility himself:
Okay, so, any of those — any of those adjectives, they're very broad in their definition. So, okay, in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects maybe we were stranded. But based on how they were couching this — that we were left and forgotten and all — we were nowhere near any of that, at all. So, "stuck" — okay we didn't get to come home the way we planned. So, in one definition we're stuck but in the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We were planned, trained — but let me comment back on this other [assertion that], you know, "they failed you." Who's they? There are many questions that, as the commander of CFT [crew flight test], I didn't ask. So, I'm culpable. I'll admit that to the nation.