SpaceX founder Elon Musk says his Starship rocket is capable of enabling “multiplanetary” life, hours after it was announced that NASA would rely on SpaceX to rescue Boeing’s Starliner-1 crew, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
After an X user shared a tweet about the Starship rocket, calling it “humanity’s only hope for interplanetary life,” Musk wrote, “I hope others have success, but there is at least one rocket that is capable of making life multiplanetary.”
Musk’s tweet follows the announcement that the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station since early June will return to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule sometime in February 2025, NASA announced.
The astronauts’ mission was originally scheduled to last only eight days, but based on this planning they will ultimately stay in space for nearly eight months.
Top NASA officials, including Administrator Bill Nelson, met in Houston on Sunday and decided to use SpaceX’s upcoming Crew 9 launch as the vehicle to free the stranded astronauts. NBC reported.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, pictured July 2 aboard the International Space Station, will return home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule sometime in February 2025
Elon Musk wrote: ‘I hope others succeed, but there is at least one rocket that is capable of making life multiplanetary.’
“Space travel is risky, even in the safest and most routine ways,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
‘A test flight is by definition neither safe nor routine.
“The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and to bring Boeing’s Starliner home unmanned is a result of our commitment to safety,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
NASA had previously indicated that the most likely way to get Wilmore and Williams home would be to attach them to another mission.
During a press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, officials announced that they had cleared two seats on the Crew-9 spacecraft for Wilmore and Williams.
Pictured: The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule approaches the International Space Station for docking on April 24, 2021
Pictured: Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which suffered serious problems during its launch into orbit, docks outside the space station on July 3, 2024.
The Crew-9 flight is currently scheduled to launch on September 24 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The failed Starliner will be released from the space station and land back on Earth in early September.
It’s a crushing blow to Boeing in the space race with Elon Musk’s company. Even before its two astronauts launched into space on June 6, the Starliner program was already more than $1.5 billion over budget and years behind schedule.
This is just the latest in a string of failures for Boeing, which last month accepted a $243.6 million settlement that would allow the company to avoid criminal charges over two fatal 737 Max crashes.
And that’s without even mentioning the many Boeing commercial planes that suffered terrifying in-flight malfunctions, the mysterious deaths of whistleblowers at the company, and former CEO Dave Calhoun’s poorly received testimony on Capitol Hill.
This Alaska Airlines flight, a Boeing 737 Max, departed on January 5 and one of the door plugs, pictured, blew out mid-flight
Pictured: The crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 MAX 8 and crashed six minutes after takeoff on March 10, 2019. All 149 passengers and eight crew members died on impact
John Barnett, left, was a Boeing whistleblower who committed suicide earlier this year. Joshua Dean, right, died in late April from a sudden illness
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun takes his seat to testify before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, with protesters in the audience
Wilmore and Williams flew into space aboard the Starliner on June 5, but NASA and Boeing engineers quickly realized there was a problem with the spacecraft’s propulsion system. It wouldn’t be safe to undock them and bring them home.
NASA officials said their biggest concern is that Starliner would burn up upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, burning up everyone on board.
Mission managers knew helium was leaking from the propulsion system before launch, but the problem appeared to worsen during flight.
NASA and Boeing engineers spent weeks analyzing these problems using a test engine built for future flights.
Two “hot fire” tests were conducted in space, during which the Starliner’s thrusters were activated while the spacecraft was docked with the space station.
This flight would be the final hurdle Boeing had to clear before NASA would certify the Starliner to regularly transport astronauts to and from the space station.
For example, SpaceX has been flying NASA astronauts to the space station since 2020.
It is not yet clear how NASA will proceed with the Starliner certification process.