Did Elon Musk say two Boeing Starliner astronauts died in space, as a social media post implies? No, that's not true: Astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were shown conducting a spacewalk nearly a month after the post -- and there's no record of Musk ever having made the statements attributed to him in the social media post. On February 3, 2025, a NASA spokesperson told Lead Stories that all the astronauts on the International Space Station "are in good health."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook where it was published on January 4, 2025. It read:
Elon Musk: 'The Boeing Starliners Stranded Astrounats Are Not With US Anymore'......... see more in comments.
The post shared a composite image displaying what looked like Musk's face. The lower banner across the graphic element read:
'THEY WON'T COME BACK'.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Feb 3 15:37:08 2025 UTC)
The post implied that Musk made a public statement announcing the death of the two astronauts in January 2025, as his company SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft is expected (archived here) to bring Williams and Wilmore back to Earth.
Astronauts
On February 3, 2025, a NASA spokesperson refuted the claim via email:
This is false. All NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are in good health, including Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. The four NASA crew members can be heard while actively working aboard the orbiting laboratory via NASA's International Space Station live stream.
Since the claim's publication date, the astronauts have conducted a spacewalk.
On January 30, 2025, NASA broadcast it live. Recorded scenes showing the faces of Williams (archived here) and Wilmore (archived here) while in spacesuits were available on the agency's YouTube channel and X account. NASA additionally published reports detailing the spacewalk here (archived here) and here (archived here).
On February 3, 2025, the agency's representative also told Lead Stories that "NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency's SpaceX Crew-9 mission as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions".
Williams and Wilmore reached the ISS in June 2024 (archived here). After safety concerns led to changing their space flight's original schedule, the astronauts' return was expected in February 2025 (archived here) and then in March 2025 (archived here).
Musk's quote
The only "proof" of the claim offered in comments to the post in question was a link to an article (archived here) published by a website that did not disclose anything about the entities behind it (archived here).
In the Terms and Conditions section (archived here), the website described itself not by its name but by the name of a different company the site linked to on the bottom of the page. That section said that the website "could include technical, typographical, or photographic errors" and that the other company:
... does not warrant that any of the materials on its website are accurate, complete or current.
The article repeated the claim in the headline but was self-debunking. Its first paragraph explicitly said that the astronauts were alive when the claim was made:
Elon Musk could soon drop a bombshell about Boeing's Starliner that could make things even worse Right now; two astronauts are trapped on the International Space Station (ISS) , missing E out on the holidays and celebrations back home. NASA has made the difficult decision to keep them in space indefinitely -- until February -- rather than risk their return on Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft.
Lead Stories checked whether the fragments of the purported quote appeared on Musk's account on X. But Google searches of his account on X of the keywords (here and here) showed no results.
Lead Stories additionally searched whether the sentence fragments were cited by any credible sources elsewhere on the internet. However, a search for the keywords seen here led to the Reuters and Politifact fact checks reviewing the same claim that has been circulating on the internet at least since September 2024.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Elon Musk are here.
