WASHINGTON — President Trump told a pair of astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nearly a year that “we’re coming up to get you,” as Elon Musk is apparently preparing to launch a SpaceX capsule in about two weeks.
Trump, 78, mused Thursday about the possibility of personally launching a rescue team into orbit to help bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth — and blasted former President Joe Biden for their eight-day mission stretching to nine months and counting.
“Biden left them up there,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We have two astronauts that are stuck in space. I have asked Elon, I said, ‘Do me a favor. Can you get them out?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ He is preparing to go up, I think in two weeks.”
The president said that “Biden was embarrassed by what happened, and he said, ‘leave them up there.’ I would have said, ‘If you’re embarrassed, you got to get them out.’ Elon is right now preparing a ship to go up and get them.”
During an exchange with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, Trump said that his message to Wilmore and Williams was: “We love you, and we’re coming up to get you, and you shouldn’t have been up there so long.”
“The most incompetent president in our history has allowed that to happen to you, but this president won’t let it happen,” Trump added.
“They’ve been left up there — I hope they like each other, maybe they love each other, I don’t know,” he mused. “But they’ve been left up there. Think of it. And I see the woman with the wild hair, good, solid hair she’s got. There’s no kidding, there’s no games with her hair.”
The two astronauts were stranded in June when an issue was found with Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which returned without them.
Musk’s SpaceX in September launched a Crew Dragon capsule to rescue the pair and it docked at the space station, but NASA opted to stall its return.
NASA said in December the two astronauts would have to wait for yet another SpaceX rescue vehicle to arrive with replacement scientists “no earlier than late March,” and then would have to go through an unspecified handover period before finally departing.
“There’s a danger up there,” Trump said Thursday.
“You can have some failures up there. That would be very bad. You gotta get them out,” he went on. “I authorized Elon a week ago, I said, ‘You know, we have two people up there that Biden and Kamala left up there,’ And he knows it very well. I said, ‘Are you equipped to get them?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’
Trump then asked officials and journalists jokingly: “Should I go on that journey just to be on the ship when we stop?””
“If that’s an option, yes,” Doocy told the president, noting he would be the “first president in space.”
Trump didn’t seem sold.
“When they come back, I’ll greet them, about about that?” he asked.
Biden administration officials have denied leaving the astronauts in space for political reasons. Wilmore and Williams in January also swatted away Trump’s prior claim that they were “abandoned” by the prior administration.
“We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded,” Wilmore claimed to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I understand why others may think that.”
Williams added, “It was a little bit longer stay than we had expected,” but “we’ve made the most of it.”
