Crew-9 Returns to Earth

Probably released and chummed for dramatic effect, or they thought it was their ride off this rock.

It plays fine for me in Firefox.

Yes the layered meaning is beautiful. It's both a meta point on the verse itself as well as a criticism about the political motivations behind "the space program"

Thanks for posting it here

That's a hook but yeah Tribe Called Quest is one of the most interesting groups in rap to listen to if you're listening for lyrical content

Not when they are used to prop up bad things or normalize the person doing them.

It seemed to all start going wrong with "pedo guy". Before then Musk was doing great things at Tesla and SpaceX.

After that he started getting more and more unhinged, leading through to buying twitter, then trying to get out of it, then doubling down.

As you said they're incompetent so it would be Russia more like. Imagine the bizarre situation that the US would be in while fighting a proxy war against them at the same time.

Also in that alternative timeline, I wonder what that would do to Americans psychologically. If China and Russia had already beat the US in space, the decline would be extremely obvious. To the rest of the world as well.

ULA is not a "incompetent monstrosity" (Boeing yes sadly). The company is making good progress with Vulcan and if they were given the funds/time to design a reusable rocket they're probably one of the few companies that has the talent/experience to pull it off. Tony Bruno is maybe the only CEO of a large space company that is a hardcore engineer and has a passion for space. Would have been cool to see BO/ULA get combined under Tony's leadership but wasn't meant to be.

> he did pour his heart and soul

And you have this knowledge, how?

> (and personal fortune) into SpaceX for over a decade.

Using paypal money to chase government contract money.

> If it weren't for SpaceX we'd be relying on the incompetent monstrosities of Boeing or ULA.

That does not automatically follow. It's entirely possible that a company better than all of them might now exist if SpaceX didn't.

SpaceX is and always has been funded by NASA. Congress simply doesn't allow NASA to do its own missions any more so it's been forced to add a middle man where it pays private companies to use its technology, infrastructure, and money to do the work it wishes it could do itself

> recent (regrettable) turn

It's only regrettable through the lens of partisan politics. DOGE is undeniably a good concept.

You will notice governments around the world copying the method. That is, launching initiatives to audit everything, cut wasteful spending, expose corrupt spending, and trim bureaucratic inefficiency via external oversight. It would be regrettable not to undertake the task.

While running his other two companies (Tesla, X), being in charge of DOGE, and making political statements on stages everywhere, AND taking care of his 14 children ... I don't think he was actually involved in this. Or maybe he was there in the mission control room, physically, just for kicks, and annoying the hell out of the engineers. Now that I find somewhat likely.

With his bare hands and mind, no less!

We know Tesla has the engineers needed to produce quality designs, but it is management that decided to cheap out on both production and quality control, and doesn't make parts easily available for repairs, which is part of the decision and policies Musk is in charge of.

With SpaceX it could go on both sides just because the engineering for spacecraft designs and rockets is not really a solved problem unlike 95% of automobile design, but management could still be the biggest problem with SpaceX. Of course that is going to be hard to see or quantify without being part of SpaceX management.

I guess it depends how you define "plainly". Musk is right at the forefront of spreading exaggerated or misleading claims. Condoms to Gaza, Power's 30M, tens of millions of dead people receiving social security. He's not new to it either - remember him alleging that the scuba diver who saved those Thai kids was a paedophile?

Funny how the richest person in the world feels less of a chilling effect than career staff at federal agencies!

What makes you think I'd prefer that he not speak plainly?

I'd certainly prefer that he:

1. Not break a bunch of laws while running the government (while having a totally unclear official role?).

2. Not use his control of twitter's algorithm to push his own political priorities.

3. Not use his wealth and bully pulpit to intimidate people (like judges) who don't just bow to whatever he wants.

But beyond that, I have absolutely no issue with him speaking plainly. And I think death threats are bad, always.

I mean, if someone is saying plainly "I'm going to ruin your life and critically endanger your health." then one should expect some pushback.

"Authoritarian" is a philosophy of how to govern. It is orthogonal to whether the government was fairly elected.

(It's true that many authoritarian regimes seek to eliminate or corrupt elections, but being fairly elected is compatible with being authoritarian.)

Is this just rage bait or a serious question? If it's the latter please explain how you see these two the same. The numbers don't match.

Yes, because it’s actually him signing the executive order and not the autopen.

Without any value judgement on the actual orders, Trump signed 89 since taking office this year. Biden signed 77 in his first year in office. There certainly seems to be a difference unless this is comin to a stop relatively quickly.

Yes.

Funny how all the replies to me are pure defensiveness about the word "authoritarian", rather than the point of my post (the chilling effects on speech).

Look as long as they keep being this salty about authoritarianism when a guy with a different letter next to his name shows up and does it, I'm fine with it.

My concern is that many won't.

It's mind-numbingly obvious from context that the plan I was referring to was the rescue plan announced in August, not the starliner mission as a whole.

What about all the other things. For example the crew dragon was docked back in september waiting for return. The last administration could have called for return at any point before the inaguration to claim glory, but didn't because they aren't hacks.

An earlier article[1] goes into more detail about how the decision was actually made, which provides more perspective about truth vs narrative. It is much more interesting than the one linked by the GP.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/nasa-officials-undermi...

> To be a little snarky here - so Senior NASA officials: honest, Musk: liar?

We know for a fact that Musk a serial liar with a very tenuous grasp of truth.

Can you say the same about the Senior NASA official?

Also, the burden of proof lies on Musk, not on NASA which literally has contingencies upon contingencies for such situations.

Are you only reading every third sentence?

The return vessel was docked in September. The return was always planned to be around today, not in September.

Trump and Musk are lying about the astronauts being forgotten. They're lying when they claim Biden abandoned them.

As far as I can tell, NASA didn't delay for political reasons. Nor did they allow the return journey today for political reasons. This was the plan all along (well, once the initial plans had to be scrapped for technical reasons).

NASA announced last August that the Starliner crew would return on SpaceX Crew-9 in Feb 2025.[1] This was discussed on Hacker News at the time.[2] Crew-9 was launched in September 2024.[3] Crew-9's return was delayed waiting for the launch of Crew-10, originally scheduled for Feb 2025, but pushed back to March. [4] Anyone repeating the claim that Trump and/or Musk "decided" to return the Starliner crew is spreading lies, deliberately or unwittingly.

1. https://nitter.net/NASA/status/1827393397939634503 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41339667 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-9 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-10

I can’t believe anyone took these claims seriously for even a moment.

Musk was a bullshitter even at his best, and he has fallen far from that peak in the past couple of years. Just go to his Twitter feed and see an unending stream of absolute nonsense.

Trump shows no indication that he even understands the concept of truth.

And yet somehow people manage to say, “NASA says X, Musk and Trump say Y, who knows who’s right?”

I'm confused by this. You can just go and look.

Hacker News comment from 6 months ago, you know, during the Biden administration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41339804:

- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.

- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September

- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats

- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025

The advent of Trump and Musk into government seems not to have changed that plan one whit, which makes absolutely no sense if they're telling the truth.

Didn’t know that the accused must prove their innocence?

Where did Musk show his proof it was political?

Given how often Musk and Trump tell BS, bend the truth and even lie I tend to believe NASA officials

An excellent journalist recognizes that the President can't unilaterally rename internationally recognized bodies of water.

What is the complaint? You don't like the style of rebuking this ridiculous behavior?

Berger wrote two books on SpaceX in a very positive light generally, portraying Musk as extraordinarily driven and capable though not passing over less admirable traits. Berger is not a hater.

I cringed reading that. It's like something an edgy West coast teenage Redditor would write.

Ad hominem.

Yeah, instead of evaluating a journalist by looking at over a decade of high-quality work he has done writing about this space, let’s pull up a joke from one article and judge that.

Do you realize that you’re the one behaving like a low-quality Redditor here.

Basically any online article site like ars comes across as a Redditor with reddit-tier takes and a mixture of ChatGPT. If you graduate to something like the NYT then you sound like a lobbyist.

IIRC Ars has stated that the story author is the ones that writes the headers/subheaders, but they write multiple and A/B testing picks the one to show.

I mean, if you read the rest of the article the subheading fits. So, it doesn't really change the message.

Maybe, but he did write

> And still, the lies came.

Pure ideological drivel. Anti technology.

What is your standard of fairness? This seems eminently fair: Musk lied for political reasons and people who care about that whole objective reality thing are criticizing him for it. He’s arguably the second-most powerful man in the world right now and craves attention like few others, so it seems quite unfair to say he shouldn’t be the subject of public criticism when he certainly doesn’t apply that standard to his own behaviour.

> None of the writers of Ars Technica are anything like fair to Musk.

True. For some reason they keep minimising the damage he is doing to both science and democracy.

You're right, they're probably not critical enough.

They were all “fair” to him until he switched politics.

Do you think it's easy to be "fair" to someone who continually spouts misinformation, falsehoods, and retweets or reply-boosts such things on an almost daily basis?

Exploiting and lying about the monumental efforts of a pioneering industry for cheap political points certainly feels like a line to me.

That DOES seem to be the rule for the right in the USA. Democrats still get kicked out of the club when they do blatant crimes and carry around bags of gold bars.

well for starters, if you're writing for a tech news website, maybe just stick to tech news instead of injecting politics into absolutely every part of our lives. tell me about some new phone or video card and keep the political rants for your twitter.

[dead]

Fundamentally, it's the "reality has a liberal bias" problem. Accurate reporting is interpreted as a political act because it disagrees with the "alternative facts" being presented by the right wing.

i never said what he says is true, just that it was not "never specified"

> find a single reason

You started this response by explicitly ignoring that reason.

> it never was controversial before

It was also never the case that the US was launching ~two rockets per week.

Tbh i personally thought it was an common sense economic thing: why pay more for SpaceX early return + a direct flight for the other astronaut that were scheduled to work on the ISS, if you can make the ones already there work in the ISS.

> This makes no sense whatsoever. The election was in November. If that was their calculation, they’d just have cosplayed astronaut-saving heroes before Trump had an opportunity to do so, between November and January. Musk is full of it, as usual

Musk offered to bring them back way before the election so HE would have appeared as the saver (and boeing would have looked terrible). Musk is probably exaggerating, but you can't completely ignore the political forces behind all this.

When was space not political?

Again, the topic is "crew returning to Earth." You, Berger, and whoever posted the arstechnica link have brought politics to the party.

I liked how they had a drone circling the recovery activity at the splashdown site. All live-streamed for our informed entertainment. SpaceX is undeniably doing a great job, although the starship explosions in our atmosphere I'm not a fan of, I look forward to that not happening.

The geologists needed for this are currently being fired and loosing their funding. Yes it would be cool, if we valued science, engineering and mutual progress as a soceity. We're rapidly going down the Total Recall / Biff Tanner timeline, so it won't be the fun version of Mars.

Not without spin gravity. Imagine 5 years of weightlessness then having to get out on foot.

You mean last year, according to this source (2017) https://youtu.be/tdUX3ypDVwI?t=2305

How long exactly do you think NASA astronauts typically spend on the ISS?

Wasn't this (or rather, the original short mission) expected to likely be the last mission for them anyways, due to age?

I really hope they'll at some point clearly say either "well, of course we missed our families, but really, getting such an opportunity was AWESOME and Boeing's misfortune was a huge lucky event for us" or "Being up there is awesome, but quite honestly, having to do it unexpectedly really sucked".

And I don't think that it is the slightest bit unprofessional to have feelings about where you spent a year of your life, or to talk about those feelings.

This was likely their last mission to start with. They’re already past prime and nearing retirement (of official astronaut duties, at least).

earth is cool but people are not

"corp-owned slave town"

in space human slave is literally most expensive labor you can choose, automatons is the way

Or the Mars envisioned in Total Recall

You really, really need to read about the actual situation before commenting. They always had a way of coming home at any point if they needed to. There was a literal whole planning session, all publicly available on Nasa's media channels detailing in great depth the steps that were taken prior to Starliner departing to ensure there was always a guaranteed safe way to get them home, even in the event of an entire station evac.

As I say, it's amazing how effective lying to people has become that you genuinely bought that total load of crap that they were stranded.

But they did have a way of going home, but chose not to take it.

When you are strapping to a rocket the plan is that you explode into lots of little pieces. Getting there and back alive is a bonus.

Erm they didn't plan to go on some 8 days business trip for some work project.

This is their life and profession. The job is extremely difficult, dangerous and mega mega expensive. Hence they don't get to do it as much as they love. Now they did.

What is this about "planning" stuff? They trained and volunteered as astronauts/cosmonauts, and that still typically entails a military career as well, and military families indeed suffer the absence of loved ones, but that is always part of the collective sacrifice that makes America, well, great... and astronauts are public figures, celebrities, smiling for the camera and making prepared statements at each milestone, and that glory they earned this for this crew was simply following orders and being trained/prepared for all eventualities while the rocket scientists worked out the logistics.

And if you follow JPL robotic missions that far outlast their mission objectives and keep going like Energizer Bunnies, then is it not sort of amazing that the astronauts really suffered no privations or hardships, in terms of food/shelter/clothing/hygiene, by extending their missions and doing useful things up there?

People watch "The Martian" and "Lost in Space" and they can't seem to grasp the careful pre-planning, incident response, resource allocation, and orcestration that goes into everything that's done by space programs.

Space missions include sprawling, branching flow-charts of every contingency they imagined, and they inform the press of mission objectives and a proposed timeline, and then life happens and when glitches come up, they roll with them because they prepared for them. Apollo 13, for example, is categorically different than a space habitation in Earth orbit; as a lone vehicle with limited resources and an isolated path, that Apollo mission ran out of planned contingencies to the point of improvising so many things and returning to fundamentals, preserving human life.

It's the peril of human life that definitely adds drama for us, and the ISS being influenced by geopolitics is categorically different than the nationalist glories of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo vs. the Soviets. But with ISS in Earth orbit, receiving regular resupply missions, being a habitable outpost, it's far different than sending up a vehicle like the Space Shuttle while everyone speculates whether another Saturn V could be constructed in time to rescue the crew because tiles fell off their heat shield.

Speaking of Saturn, I've been peering into Greek/Roman mythology, and learning what Cronus/Saturn did with his children and how Aphrodite/Venus was born, gives new insight into super heavy-lift launch vehicles named after the deity.

oh I don't know, grueling rehab and moderate health consequences in exchange for getting to spend nine months in space seems like it'd be a deal many would take.

i think the flight up is the scariest part.

They knew these risks when they signed up, and the queue of people dreaming to be astronauts despite these risks is enormous. Some crew members coming back on this mission had gone multiple times.

Did someone ask them to really know they liked the unplanned stay or are we all just making things up?

...especially since both are at an age where this will probably be their last mission.