--- title: "Elon Musk Got Humiliated by a Space Station Astronaut Immediately Before Announcing Space Station Should Be Destroyed" description: "Elon Musk fumed at a International Space Station astronaut who called out his lies, then immediately called for the station's destruction." date: "2025-02-21" modified: "2025-02-21" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/elon-musk-argument-iss-destroy" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "Off-World" - "Space" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "elon musk" - "international space station" - "NASA" - "SpaceX" --- # Elon Musk Got Humiliated by a Space Station Astronaut Immediately Before Announcing Space Station Should Be Destroyed ![Elon Musk fumed at a International Space Station astronaut who called out his lies, then immediately called for the station's destruction.]() *\Image: Andrew Harnik via Getty / Futurism\* Immediately prior to [calling for the imminent destruction of the International Space Station](), Elon Musk got into a heated fight with an astronaut from the orbital outpost. Let's set the scene. Earlier this week, an interview with Elon Musk and President Donald Trump aired on *Fox News*. When the topic swung to the fates of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been aboard the ISS for eight months due to the [failure of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft](), Musk and Trump implied that the Biden administration had abandoned them on purpose. "They were left up there for political reasons," Musk [said in the interview](). This didn't sit well with Andreas Mogensen, a [European Space Agency astronaut]() who served as the ISS commander between September 2023 and March 2024. Responding to Musk's claims on X, Mogensen [wrote](): "What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media." Musk, in return, had a complete meltdown. "You are fully r\*tarded," he [told Mogensen](), using a slur against people with intellectual disabilities. "SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused." Unfazed by the vitriol coming from the world's richest man, Mogensen, who also piloted a SpaceX mission to the ISS in 2023, calmly pushed back. "You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September," Mogensen [wrote](), referring to the SpaceX capsule. "Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September." To fill in for those out of the loop: there's already a spacecraft docked at the ISS, the Crew-9 Dragon capsule, that's scheduled to bring the astronauts home. It wouldn't make any sense to spend hundreds of millions of more dollars to send up another one just to bring two astronauts back *slightly* sooner. Musk is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill over the fact that the original February date for the return mission [was pushed back a month]() during Biden's last weeks in office — but this was done to give Musk's own company, SpaceX, more time to get its next Crew-10 mission ready, which will be bringing Williams' and Wilmore's replacements. Musk didn't have a response for Mogensen. But just three hours later he tweeted this: "It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the \[Space Station\]. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility." "Let's go to Mars," Musk added. To be clear, NASA has already put the plans in motion to decommission the [aging ISS](), which has served longer than it was originally designed to; in June, the space agency tapped Musk's SpaceX, in fact, [to construct a vehicle to deorbit it](). But the original schedule is to accomplish this by 2030. Musk is saying we should can the station *now* — right after getting owned by an ISS astronaut. "The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I recommend 2 years from now," Musk said in a [followup tweet](). The timing of this pivot is absolutely not a coincidence; Musk really is [that]() [petty](). **More on billionaire BS:** *[Elon Musk Just Caused a Huge Headache for the New Head of NASA]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()