They are still there.

Yes. Musk is trying to figure out a way to charge them for room and board while trapped up there.

Did he make the write five bullet points of wheat they did this week?

They are not really stranded. Astronauts on the ISS always have a way to get back. It’s just a matter of scheduling. The capsule they are scheduled to use for the return trip arrived last Sept (6 months ago). They have been doing work planned for other astronauts the whole time. The scheduled return date of that capsule is Mar 2025, so that’s why they are headed back this month. So much BS floating around to politicize it all. They could have come down earlier but there were no astronauts scheduled to go up to replace them until this month anyway. ISS work would have been left undone if they had left earlier. NASA didn’t want to pay SpaceX for a separate capsule just to bring them down earlier either. So money and productivity came into play. Don’t want to be inefficient, right?
https://www.washingtonian.com/2025/02/05/nasa-stranded-astronauts-international-space-station/

@RocketGuy Weren’t they supposed to be only up there for 8 days initially?

It was supposed to be 9 days originally. The news that I’ve been watching (NBC news) has been saying all along that this wasn’t planned.

I’m not sure they want a rescue from Musk, as his rockets have blown up.

Not arguing, just posting what I found.

Cut and pasted from the NY Times:

The astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, docked at the space station in June. Their trip was not supposed to last much longer than a week or two in orbit as part of a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. But because Starliner’s propulsion system malfunctioned during the trip there, NASA repeatedly extended the pair’s stay as engineers tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/science/musk-spacex-trump-nasa-astronauts.html?searchResultPosition=2

@janbb – yep, they were supposed to be there for only so many days. On their way to the ISS they did extensive thruster testing which overheated and damaged several thrusters. (Their thermal engineers don’t rule the roost like ours do.) But they were able to get to ISS and dock safely. Then NASA and Boeing spent a lot of time troubleshooting. Based on what they found, NASA calculated odds of astronaut harm to be lower if the astronauts just stayed up there until the next SpaceX capsule went up (Sept) and came back down (Mar). This also gave Boeing the opportunity to play with Starliner even more, knowing that a major failure wouldn’t harm any astronauts. So they undocked Starliner and did some final testing. They overheated a few more thrusters, proving out their calculations. Then the (empty) Starliner came down safely using the spare thrusters that were there to begin with.

@RocketGuy I know all that – or most of it. That’s why your first post was unclear.

The NASA astronauts are set to return on March 19 or 20, but they will make their return to Earth with SpaceX, aboard its Crew-9 return flight.

What if it was Katy Perry up there for so long?

According to Trump’s NASA puppet, the ISS is haunted by the ghosts of David Bowie and Major Tom! ;-0