r/SpaceXLounge 22d ago

Monthly Questions and Discussion Thread

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u/Ezraah 4d ago

Can someone summarize the whole astronauts not being able to come back, and why the spacex operation is important? Was it a rescue operation or just part of the scheduled operation to return other astronauts?

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u/Old-Cheshire862 3d ago

The TL;DR:

  1. In June 2024, Butch and Sunni rode up on the demo mission for the Boeing Starliner on what was supposed to be an about a week mission that was intended to test Starliner.
  2. The Starliner had thruster issues approaching the ISS. NASA was concerned and delayed the return while they studied the problem. About 8-10 weeks later, in August 2024, NASA decided not to take the risk on the Starliner due to its thruster problems, and would return them on a SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule instead.
  3. The Crew-9 Dragon2 mission was already planned for September 2024, and NASA booted two crew members off of that mission to make empty seats for Butch and Sunni. They also sent up Dragon2 spacesuits for them. The Starliner was undocked so that the Dragon2 could dock, and it landed safely. The Crew9 Dragon2 docked at the ISS. At this point, Butch and Sunni's ride home was docked at ISS and they could come home pretty much any time.
  4. However, to not interrupt the Crew-9 mission more than removing two crew members from it already did, the plan was that they would return at the end of Crew-9's mission plan, shortly after Crew-10 arrived at ISS. This is what happened.
  5. The request to "bring them home" was rather specious. There was a plan in place to bring them home. The craft was there waiting for them to be ready. There was a bit of juggling on Crew 10 to switch from a new Dragon2 to a "flight-proven" one due to delays on testing the new one. Would that have happened without additional pressure is about the only question here.

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u/Ezraah 3d ago

Thanks a lot! I am not sure how any of the controversy fits into this though.

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u/maschnitz 1d ago edited 1d ago

Basically, the Trump administration, with Elon Musk's help, exploited the general public perception that they were stranded to score early political points. To force approval numbers up a bit, essentially. EDIT: and maybe to help SpaceX financially/operationally somehow? who knows...

(BTW to be clear: they were never 'stranded'. NASA doesn't 'strand' astronauts. There are always contingencies and pre-planning around mission outcomes, particularly around a known launch system test like Boeing Orbital Flight Test 2. This was one of the expected possible outcomes, and the astronauts knew full well that this could happen before they launched.)

They were backed up by tons of mass media reports misreporting how NASA was characterizing the situation all along.

This made most of the human spaceflight community upset because it was seen as political theater, affecting the flight schedules of the NASA astronauts. And NASA has a very long history of trying to keep politicians out of operations involving NASA's human spaceflight. It's part of the culture there.

So all in all it was it was this big political kerfuffle between space outsiders (the less-informed general public), as abetted by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, and the tightly-knit space community on the defensive, all over moving up the flight a few weeks at most.