The last part of URL is
butch-and-suni-send-mixed-messages-on-whether-politics-delayed-their-return
For what it is worth, all of the reporting done by Ars over the last nine months suggests the decision to return Wilmore and Williams this spring was driven by technical reasons and NASA's needs on board the International Space Station, rather than because of politics.
Q. Did politics influence NASA's decision for you to stay longer in space?
Wilmore: From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short. That's what we do in human spaceflight.
The best support from the headline comes from:
Q. Elon Musk said he made an offer to bring Butch and Suni home last year, but it was denied by the White House. Is this true?
Wilmore: I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual. We have no information on that, though, whatsoever; what was offered, what was not offered; who it was offered to, how that process went. That's information that we simply don't have. So I believe him.
Musk makes a lot of public offers .. he offered a submarine that wasn't practical, he offered a 420 weed joke for Twitter and got nailed to the mast with it by the SEC. It's likely factual that he offered to bring back this crew early.
It likely wasn't practical for any number of reasons.
The early February SpaceX crew rotation has been pushed back by SpaceX to late March.
Wilmore and Williams flew Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the ISS last summer for an eight-day test mission that instead has lasted nearly a year because of problems with the craft’s propulsion system.
NASA in August, during Biden’s administration, deemed Starliner too risky to bring them back to Earth and tapped SpaceX to return them on a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
That craft is already docked with the space station, having flown there for NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission in September with empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.
The astronauts’ original February departure date on Crew-9 was delayed to late March because SpaceX needed more time “to complete processing” of a new Crew Dragon capsule that will replace theirs for the Crew-10 mission, NASA said in December.
There's also a timeline recap in this threads submitted Ars Technica article.
The political posturing here appears to originate with Musk and recently Trump has attached himself to the story.
I am so confused.
Wow, USA is indeed turning into a caricature of the USSR.
I was very young then but still almost having a de ja vu reading these lines.
I don't think NASA astronauts 20 years ago would have said anything different.
Any NASA astronaut is going to talk up their respect for the President, regardless of which party they are from or what they privately think of said President, because it is seen as part of the job description. That was true in the 1960s, it is true today, it has been true every point in-between.
Even Musk – 20 years ago, if a NASA astronaut had been asked by journalists for their opinion on a senior advisor to the President, or their opinion on the CEO of a major NASA vendor, the expectation would be either they say something positive or find a way to dodge the question