Summary
Elon Musk accused former president Joe Biden of stranding NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the ISS “for political reasons,” prompting Danish astronaut Andreas “Andy” Mogensen to label the claim “a lie.”
“What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media,” wrote the 48-year-old European Space Agency astronaut.
Musk called Mogensen “fully retarded” and claimed SpaceX could’ve rescued the astronauts months ago, without evidence.
NASA refuted Musk’s abandonment claim, calling it baseless.
Im trying to figure out the angle on that one. I suppose he thinks if its deorbited during Trumps term, he can corrupt his way to extremely lucritive contracts building a new one that he can charge rent for. At the very least lucritive contracts to send all the parts for a new one to space.
By 2030 he’ll be in exile somewhere evading prison, so it has to happen ASAP.
The ISS is also a symbol I think. The “International” Space Station. Think about how Soviet and American’s worked together on Skylab, and how that inspired the creation of what is truly a marvel and testament to humanity. Space has a been a place for the future and hope - it doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from, what matters is the spirit of exploration and desire to better understand the universe.
Elon wants his name on a Mars mission above everything else. He wants history to talk about how he got us there, and imagines a future where planetary exploration allows his progeny to be lords of entire planets. Safety doesn’t matter, and we’ll probably end up with the first Americans to die in space in the next few years. (Will the US space program become as secret as the Soviet era one?)
He’s pretty transparent in his conflict of interest. He wants a SpaceX contract for a Mars mission. In the same tweet he said the ISS needs to be deorbited, he also said “let’s go to Mars instead!” This is him trying to make that happen. In a better world, this kind of blatant cronyism would be immediately punished.
Probably wants to shift the funds to a moon mission and then award himself contracts from that budget to fund Starship. ISS is less useful for him now since he’s already used contracts for supplying to develop F9, and contracts for crew missions to develop crew Dragon.
There is a moon mission and a starship variant is supposed to get people on and off the moon in 2027. Probably wants that cancelled and changed to a manned Mars mission with new, further away deadlines. Such a mission would be probably be cancelled anyways due to the much higher difficulty allowing him to save face by blaming regulators etc and promising SpaceX will colonize Mars “in the next 5 years”™.