Dragon continued its stately descent, falling to 400 meters, then 300, and then 200 above the ocean.<\/p>\n
Kate Tice, an engineer from SpaceX on the webcast, noted that touchdown was imminent. \u201cWe\u2019re going to stand by for splashdown located in the Gulf of America,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Ah, yes. The Gulf of America.<\/p>\n
This is why we can\u2019t have nice things.<\/p>\n
A throne of lies<\/h2>\n
For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months\u2014and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusive stories about this long and strange saga\u2014the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
In February, President Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were \u201cstranded\u201d in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. \u201cThey got left in space,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were left up there for political reasons,\u201d Musk concluded.<\/p>\n
Just what those political reasons were was never specified. But the basic message was clear: Biden, bad; Trump, good.<\/p>\n
The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August. The spacecraft that brought them back to Earth on Tuesday safely docked to the space station in September. They could have come home at any time since. NASA\u2014not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making\u2014decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.<\/p>\n
And still, the lies came.<\/p>\n The president of the United States shares his thoughts on Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.<\/p>\n Credit: On Monday, the president posted a long statement on Truth Social that repeated this canard of the Biden administration: \u201cThey shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be very embarrassing event for them\u2014another thing I inherited from that group of incompetents.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump then went on to state that he and Musk had just sent up a SpaceX Dragon (which, in point of fact, launched last September) to rescue the crew.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n One of the common refrains about spaceflight for decades and decades is that it is nonpartisan.<\/p>\n That is, the Apollo Program brought America together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country. Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight. If you watch committee meetings in the House and Senate, the members always say this, and the discussions are nearly always cordial. As for the \u201cincompetent\u201d Biden administration, they didn\u2019t really play politics with the space program. They liked the \u201cArtemis Program\u201d created by the Trump administration well enough that they simply kept it.<\/p>\n But if we\u2019re going to start lying about basic truths like the fate of Wilmore and Williams\u2014and let\u2019s be real, the only purpose of this lie is to paint the Trump administration as saviors in comparison to the Biden administration\u2014then space is not going to remain apolitical for all that long. And in the long run, that would be bad for NASA.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s also be clear that Musk and SpaceX are currently flying the only spacecraft in the Western world that is capable of reliably flying humans into orbit. Without Dragon, NASA would have been beholden to Russia for the last five years for human spaceflight. And when Boeing\u2019s Starliner had issues nine months ago en route to the International Space Station, NASA was fortunate to have the reliable Dragon program to turn to.<\/p>\n Yet perverting that good news story into some tawdry political gain cheapens SpaceX, NASA, and Wilmore and Williams. In this case, the truth was beautiful. When one American space company had a problem, another stepped in, and the heroic astronauts made it home safely with a perfect backdrop.<\/p>\n If only the story ended there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It looked like the final scene of a movie, the denouement of a long adventure in which the good guys finally prevail. Azure skies and brilliant blue seas provided a perfect backdrop on Tuesday evening as a spacecraft carrying four people neared the planet\u2019s surface. \u201cJust breathtaking views of a calm, glass-like ocean off the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1164,190,21,316],"class_list":["post-44757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-crew-9","tag-nasa","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/truth-social.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Truth Social<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nCan space remain nonpartisan?<\/h2>\n