Musk claims he made a suggestion on to senior officers within the Biden Administration. Now we have no solution to confirm that, however it does appear clear that the Biden administration by no means communicated such a suggestion to lower-level officers inside NASA, who made their choice for technical quite than political causes.

“I feel you already know we work for NASA, and we labored with NASA cooperatively to do no matter we expect was the proper factor,” the SpaceX official, Gerstenmaier, replied. “You understand, we had been keen to assist in any method they thought was the proper solution to assist. They got here up with the choice you heard described at present by them, and we’re supporting that choice.”

Did Trump inform NASA to speed up Butch and Suni’s return?

As of late final yr, the Crew 9 mission was on account of return in mid-February. Nevertheless, there was a battery concern with a brand new Dragon spacecraft that was going for use to fly Crew 10 into orbit. Consequently, NASA announced on December 17 that the return of the crew was delayed into late March or early April.

Then, on February 11, NASA introduced that the Crew 10 launch was being introduced ahead to March 12. This was a few weeks sooner than deliberate, and it was doable as a result of NASA and SpaceX determined to swap out Dragon capsules, utilizing a beforehand flown car—Crew Dragon Endurance—for Crew 10.

So was this alteration to speed up the return of Wilmore and Williams politically pushed?

The choice to swap to Endurance was made in late January, Stich mentioned, and this allowed the launch date to be moved ahead. Requested if political strain was a motive, Stich mentioned it was not. “It actually was pushed by a number of different elements, and we had been this earlier than a few of these statements had been made by the President and Mr. Musk,” he mentioned.

Bowersox added that this was appropriate but additionally mentioned that NASA appreciated the President’s curiosity within the house program.

“I can confirm that Steve has been speaking about how we’d must juggle the flights and swap capsules a great month earlier than there was any dialogue exterior of NASA, however the President’s curiosity positive added power to the dialog,” Bowersox mentioned.