WASHINGTON — President Trump said Tuesday that he expects to welcome rescued US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the Oval Office when they “get better” following their long-awaited return to Earth Tuesday.
Wilmore, 62, and Williams, 59, arrived back home 278 days behind schedule aboard a SpaceX capsule after being stranded in space last June when defects were found with a Boeing return craft.
“Number one, they have to get better,” Trump told Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham in an interview taped shortly before the astronauts’ successful splash-down in the Gulf of America Tuesday evening.
“You know, when you’re up there and you have no pull in your muscle, you have no gravity, you can lift 1,000 pounds like this,” Trump said.
“They have to get, they have to get better. It’s going to be a little bit tough for them. It’s not easy. They were up there a long time, and when they do, they’ll come to the Oval Office.”
The president and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have blamed former President Joe Biden for leaving the pair of astronauts in space for so long.
“They were left up there for political reasons, which is not good,” Musk said last month.
“He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space … He didn’t want the publicity,” Trump claimed ahead of the mission to bring them home.
SpaceX in September launched a Crew Dragon capsule to rescue the pair, and it docked at the space station, but NASA opted to stall its return.
NASA said in December the two astronauts would have to wait for yet another SpaceX rescue vehicle to arrive with replacement scientists.
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