Space

For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months—and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusive stories about this long and strange saga—the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.

In February, President Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. "They got left in space," Trump said.

"They were left up there for political reasons," Musk concluded.

Just what those political reasons were never specified. But the basic message was clear: Biden, bad; Trump, good.

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—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided 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.

And still, the lies came.