After the safe return Tuesday of two astronauts left behind for months on the International Space Station, the White House characterized the pair as “stranded” and trumpeted their return as a “rescue.” Those are words that NASA has been resisting for months.

It made for an awkward situation in a post-splashdown press conference, when NASA administrators insisted they could have brought Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home at any time, while also seeking not to contradict the president.

The two returned as part of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, having been on board the station since June after flying up on Boeing’s Starliner.

“PROMISE MADE, PROMISE KEPT: President Trump pledged to rescue the astronauts stranded in space for nine months,” was the message posted to the White House X account after the landing.

But NASA officials, though parsing their words carefully, stuck to a different narrative.

“We always had a lifeboat, a way for them to come home,” NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said.

Wilmore and Williams flew up on Starliner’s Crew Flight Test, arriving June 6 on what was supposed to be as short as an eight-day stay. Starliner, though, suffered thruster failures and helium leaks in its propulsion system. NASA ultimately elected to send Starliner home without crew and have Wilmore and Williams join the SpaceX Crew-9 mission.

“We tried to look for opportunities to bring the crew back when it was safe to do so,” Stich said.

From Stich’s point of view, what some saw as the plight of Wilmore and Williams was instead part of what being an astronaut is all about — and the fact Starliner was a test flight always meant the short stay could be extended.

“The thing I think back of this whole time frame is how really resilient Butch and Suni were the whole time,” he said. “They became seamlessly part of the International Space Station, and they did that because they were experienced astronauts, and we had prepared.”

But for months, the Trump camp’s political spin has gone in a different direction.

Trump adviser Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has claimed that during the Biden administration SpaceX offered to get the astronauts earlier than the time frame that became NASA’s plan — but was rebuffed for political reasons ahead of the election. After Trump was elected, he said he had directed SpaceX to bring them home “as soon as possible.”

Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate, said at the press conference that of course the agency listened to the president.

“NASA as an agency, we work for the president, and whoever’s there, we work for them,” Montalbano said. “We had an input from that office. We took a look at it. And you know, our job is to take all the inputs we get and operate as successful and safely as we can.

“And that’s what we would do for this administration, and that’s what we would do for any administration.”

Nevertheless, the statements from Musk and then Trump did force the Starliner astronauts’ extended stay into a brighter national spotlight. Their words actually came after it was announced in January that Williams and Wilmore would have to stay even longer than expected — potentially not flying home until April.

Part of that delay was the fault of SpaceX. It was not able to get a fifth Dragon spacecraft working in time for what was originally targeted as the mid-February replacement flight that would allow the astronauts to come home.

That forced NASA and SpaceX to shift to a different Crew Dragon. And ultimately Musk’s company was able to bring the pair home in mid-March.

In the end, Montalbano said politics and public pressure did not play into NASA’s decisions.

“Our job at NASA is to successfully and safely fly these missions,” he said. “We fly it with the laws of physics and we fly it with our commercial partners. And so oftentimes, there may be things out in the press that may not be exactly what’s happening.”

Musk’s efforts to play up the issue have a competitive benefit for his own company: They emphasize SpaceX’s capabilities while painting rival Boeing’s Starliner as incapable. Stich and Montalbano insist that is not the case.

“We’re working hand-in-hand with Boeing as well on certification of Starliner, getting that vehicle back to flight,” Stich said.

While thanking SpaceX for the assist getting the astronauts home, he said he still believes NASA needs both Starliner and Dragon as options.

“Butch and Suni’s return on Dragon, to me, shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems, the importance of Starliner and the redundancy that we’re building in human spaceflight for our low-Earth-orbit economy,” Stich said.

He noted that Boeing was just as keen to have the duo home as SpaceX — even having a watch party for the return.

“It shows the flexibility of our commercial providers, the fact that they flew up on the Boeing vehicle and home on SpaceX,” Montalbano said. “This is a lesson learned for NASA too, such that when we do have Boeing and SpaceX both flying on a regular basis, we need to be able to do the opposite too — if we come up on a SpaceX vehicle and have a problem, to be bringing people home on a Boeing vehicle.”

Just when that might come to fruition is a question NASA and Boeing are working to answer.

The biggest issue is solving the thruster problems and helium leaks. The spacecraft did manage a safe return trip last year, and Stich said teams are expecting to make decisions on the next flights for Boeing and SpaceX later this summer.

He said Boeing’s next flight might be an uncrewed Starliner — “crew-capable,” just with all the propulsion system fixes in place.

“What we’d like to do is the one flight and then get into a crew rotation flight,” Stich said. “So the next flight up would really test all the changes we’re making to the vehicle, and then the next fight beyond that, we really need to get Boeing into a crewed rotation. So that’s kind of the strategy.”

NASA is looking at Boeing’s contract to see what could be done for the company to treat that mission as a post-certification flight — meaning it becomes one of six operational flights Starliner was awarded as part of a contract worth $4.6 billion it has yet to collect on. Boeing has reported more than $2 billion in losses on the program through 2024.

Starliner has fallen more than five years behind SpaceX under the Commercial Crew Program. They won contracts in 2014 but SpaceX made its first crewed test flight to the station in May 2020 and has flown 62 humans in space across its fleet of four Crew Dragons — including 10 rotational missions for NASA to the station.

Stich, though, said he’s confident Boeing won’t throw in the towel on Starliner.

“They realized that they have an important vehicle, and we were very close to having a capability that we would like to field,” he said.

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