Why did Elon Musk just say Trump wants to bring two stranded astronauts home?

For reasons that were not immediately clear, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to his social media site X on Tuesday evening to make a perplexing space-based pronouncement.

“The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so,” Musk wrote. “Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”

Now generally, at Ars Technica, it is not our policy to write stories strictly based on things Elon Musk says on X. However, this statement was so declarative, and so consternation-inducing for NASA, it bears a bit of explication.

First of all, the most plausible explanation for this is that Elon is being Elon. “He’s trolling,” said one of my best space policy sources shortly after Musk’s tweet. After all, the tweet was sent at 4:20 pm in the central time zone, where SpaceX now has its headquarters.

Even if it is trolling, it will still cause headaches within NASA.

Foremost, NASA has gone to great lengths to stress that the two astronauts referenced here—Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—are not stranded on the International Space Station. There is some debate about whether there was a period last summer when the pair, who flew to the space station on a Boeing Starliner vehicle in early June, were briefly stranded. That mission was hobbled by technical issues, including problems with Starliner’s propulsion system. (Ultimately, Starliner flew home without its crew.) However, since the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission with two empty seats in late September, Wilmore and Williams have had a safe ride home. The Dragon vehicle is presently docked to the space station.