NASA made the correct decision to leave astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station last summer to await the ship’s next crew, but Elon Musk is “not wrong” with his claims that one of his SpaceX Dragon spacecraft could also have been sent to bring them back to Earth, retired Space Station Commander Leroy Chiao said on Newsmax Saturday.
“The decision was made properly,” Chiao told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America Weekend” about NASA. “I believe that they should not [have returned] on the Starliner, even though we all felt that the Starliner would probably make it back OK. It just wasn’t worth the risk. And the Starliner did come back OK.”
Wilmore and Williams flew to the International Space Station last June aboard on the Boeing Starliner, but NASA and Boeing identified helium leaks and issues with the spacecraft reaction control thrusters on June 6 as the Starliner approached the Space Station.
The agency said that the uncertainty about the Starliner prompted leaders to move the two astronauts to the Crew-10 mission.
Originally, Wilmore and Williams were to leave the station in February when the Crew-10 mission arrived on SpaceX’s new Dragon spacecraft.
NASA, however, delayed Crew-10’s departure date in December, which also delayed the return of Crew-9.
Musk, during his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, insisted that he could have “obviously brought them back sooner” but said the Biden administration did not want that to happen as it “didn’t want anyone who supported President [Donald] Trump to look good” during the election.
Chiao told Newsmax Saturday that the decisions left the astronauts on the Space Station for about eight months, which was “obviously disruptive” to their personal lives.
However, he said that both astronauts have flown on long-duration missions before, so it was “no problem” for them to remain in space.
“We are trained to be adaptable and to take care of the situation, any situation that arises, and that’s exactly what they did there,” Chiao said. “They are consummate professionals.”
But Musk was “not wrong” in saying he could have been ordered to send up a SpaceX Dragon to get the astronauts through a dedicated mission.
“I obviously don’t have any insight into the machinations of what happened,” he said. “But it is true that he could have sent a Dragon to get them on a dedicated mission.”
Chiao also discussed the news that NASA has dropped the odds of a football field-sized asteroid of hitting Earth in 2032 to almost zero.
“This is something that people have talked about for a long time,” Chiao said. “You know, 66 million or so years ago, a large asteroid or meteor hit in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and in the Gulf of America, and most scientists agree that that ended up changing the climate so much that the dinosaurs and a lot of the life on Earth was wiped out.”
He also said that even if there was a way to hit a large asteroid and deflect its path, matters could always be made worse as it could be scattered into several large objects, “one of which could actually hit us, when it might all have missed.”
“It’s kind of an ongoing debate on, well, 66 million years ago or we do [prepare] for another impact like that, or do we have another 66 million years?”
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