President Donald Trump has another message for the NASA astronauts.
As Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Willmore remain in space after an eight-day mission last June went awry, the president shared a some words of encouragement to the NASA astronauts 21 months into their time on the International Space Station.
“We love you and we’re coming up to get you, and you shouldn’t have been up there so long,” he said in a C-Span broadcast, via Forbes. “We’re gonna get them out.”
Trump also shared that he asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, also the head of his new Department of Government Efficiency, to retrieve them from space as a “favor” adding, “Elon is right now preparing a ship to go up and get them.”
As Trump put it, “I said, ‘Are you equipped to get them?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ He’s got a starship and they’re preparing it right now. So, Elon is going to go up and get them.”
Trump added that Musk, whose space tech company is behind the craft set to retrieve the astronauts, “is preparing to go up in two weeks,” falling in line with the timeline previously shared by the astronauts to CNN, where they said they’d return to Earth around March 19.
