Billionaire Elon Musk hurled a slur at Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen in a heated exchange on X on Thursday.
The world’s richest man and the head of President Donald Trump’s newly minted federal cost-cutting scheme threw out the r-word after Mogensen called Musk’s assertion that two American astronauts were stranded in space “for political reasons” a blatant falsehood.
“What a lie,” Mogensen said in response to an interview snippet from Trump and Musk’s joint interview with Sean Hannity. “And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”
After dropping accusing Mogenen of being mentally disabled via a slur, the seeming “co-president” accused the administration of former president Joe Biden of intentionally delaying the astronauts’ return.
“SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago,” Musk wrote. “I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have indeed been on the International Space Station since last summer when the Boeing Starliner craft they were taking on a test flight experienced several failures. NASA felt it best to have the Starliner return to Earth empty and bring the astronauts home on a later SpaceX flight. That make-up flight has also been delayed.
The astronauts themselves have objected to the “stranded” framing.
“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
Mogensen replied to the billionaire and SpaceX CEO’s rude rant, pointing out that SpaceX was already tasked with bringing the two home last year by the Biden administration. Musk, who averages around 100 posts to his social media platform per day, quickly pivoted to a proposal to end trips to the ISS.
The near-half-a-trillionaire wrote on Thursday that it was “time to begin preparations for deorbiting” the station that serves as the centerpiece of a global scientific partnership.
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