A Meticulous Breakdown of Trump’s Desperate Attempt to Take Credit for the Starliner Crew’s Return

[Tiangou]

https://gizmodo.com/a-meticulous-breakdo...2000577445

The Starliner saga is finally coming to an end with the return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on Tuesday after a prolonged nine month stay in space. The story is largely over, but that didn’t prevent President Donald Trump from taking one final stab at the former administration—a stab packed with disinformation, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods.

Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social on Monday to once again take credit for the plan to bring the Starliner astronauts back home. The NASA duo, Wilmore and Williams, launched to the International Space Station on board Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on June 5, 2024. The mission was supposed to last for eight days but NASA declared Starliner unsafe in the wake of alarming technical issues. The spacecraft returned home empty, with Wilmore and Williams assigned a pair of seats aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which finally undocked from the ISS on Tuesday, March 18 at 1:05 a.m. ET.

Trump is disingenuously claiming to have facilitated a rescue mission to bring the astronauts home, accusing the Biden administration of having “abandoned” them. The president’s latest social media diatribe on the return of Crew-9, posted to Truth Social on Monday, is a doozy, filled with nonsensical claims and glaring inaccuracies. We went through Trump’s post, fact-checking the president’s various claims and providing background and context to reveal the true story...

[wurm]

You know, shortly after splashdown I was wondering how long it would be before he took credit for getting them home and blamed Biden for making it necessary.

Not long, apparently. What an ass.

[pdq]

This part was particularly damning to Trump’s re-write:

The [Boeing] Starliner crew was never in need of a rescue mission - a [SpaceX] Crew Dragon spacecraft - the one that launched in September - has been parked outside the ISS this entire time! The crew could have left the station at any point since September. However, doing so would have been incredibly wasteful, as the other Crew-9 astronauts would have had to join them for the return trip. Six month stints aboard the ISS are standard.

Which is to say, NASA sent up a SpaceX rocket to the ISS in September with only two of the four seats filled. They could have promptly loaded up the two “abandoned” astronauts into those two empty seats and brought them back then.

But as the piece says, it would have been incredibly wasteful, leaving no astronauts on the ISS. Instead, the two Boeing astronauts essentially pulled a double shift. Dunno about you, but I saw them on TV saying repeatedly, that they were fine - that they stayed longer than they had originally planned, that they were looking forward to getting back to earth, but they were fine.

And of course, all this was planned at NASA, during Biden’s time. So, as usual, Trump is coming in at the last minute and claiming it was all his doing.

:RollingEyesSmiley5:

Thanks for the link, Tiangou.

[vision63]

pdq wrote:
This part was particularly damning to Trump’s re-write:

The [Boeing] Starliner crew was never in need of a rescue mission - a [SpaceX] Crew Dragon spacecraft - the one that launched in September - has been parked outside the ISS this entire time! The crew could have left the station at any point since September. However, doing so would have been incredibly wasteful, as the other Crew-9 astronauts would have had to join them for the return trip. Six month stints aboard the ISS are standard.

Which is to say, NASA sent up a SpaceX rocket to the ISS in September with only two of the four seats filled. They could have promptly loaded up the two “abandoned” astronauts into those two empty seats and brought them back then.

But as the piece says, it would have been incredibly wasteful, leaving no astronauts on the ISS. Instead, the two Boeing astronauts essentially pulled a double shift. Dunno about you, but I saw them on TV saying repeatedly, that they were fine - that they stayed longer than they had originally planned, that they were looking forward to getting back to earth, but they were fine.

And of course, all this was planned at NASA, during Biden’s time. So, as usual, Trump is coming in at the last minute and claiming it was all his doing.

:RollingEyesSmiley5:

Thanks for the link, Tiangou.

If SpaceX never existed, wed've just sent up a Space Shuttle. "All aboard!" Same outcome.