On Monday, the president posted a long statement on Truth Social that repeated this canard of the Biden administration, "They shamefully forgot about the Astronauts, because they considered it to be very embarrassing event for them—another thing I inherited from that group of incompetents."

Trump then went on to state that he and Musk had just sent up a SpaceX Dragon (which, in point of fact, launched last September) to rescue the crew. //

One of the common refrains about spaceflight for decades and decades is that it is nonpartisan.

That is, the Apollo Program brought the country together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country. Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight. //

But if we're going to start lying about basic truths like the fate of Wilmore and Williams—and let's be real, the only purpose of this lie is to paint the Trump administration as saviors in comparison to the Biden administration—then space is not going to remain apolitical for all that long. And in the long run, that would be bad for NASA.

Let's also be clear that Musk and SpaceX are currently flying the only spacecraft in the Western world that is capable of reliably flying humans into orbit. Without Dragon, NASA would have been beholden to Russia for the last five years for human spaceflight. And when Boeing's Starliner had issues nine months ago en route to the International Space Station, NASA was fortunate to have the reliable Dragon program to turn to.

Yet perverting that good news story into some tawdry political gain cheapens SpaceX, NASA, and Wilmore and Williams. In this case, the truth was beautiful. When one American space company had a problem, another stepped in, and the heroic astronauts made it home safely with a perfect backdrop.

If only the story ended there.