‘Out Of My Own Pocket’: Trump Offers To Cover Overtime For Stranded Astronauts

 President Donald Trump said Friday that he would personally cover overtime pay for two NASA astronauts stuck at the International Space Station for more than nine months.

Trump made the comments in the Oval Office after a reporter asked him about the fact that astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore would only receive about five dollars per day for every day they were stranded in space. The NASA astronauts were supposed to only be gone for an eight-day mission but ended up being there for 286 days after the Boeing spacecraft that was supposed to pick them up malfunctioned. 

“Well, nobody has ever mentioned this to me,” Trump told Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. “If I have to, I’ll pay it out of my own pocket, Okay? I’ll get it for them.”

Williams and Wilmore are only entitled to around $1400 for the extra time they spent in space.

“Is that all? That’s not a lot for what they had to go through. And I want to thank (SpaceX CEO) Elon Musk,” Trump added. “Think if we don’t have him. You know, there’s only so long, even though they’re in the capsule up there, the body starts to deteriorate after nine or ten months, and gets really bad after 14, 15 months, with the bones and the blood and all the things that you’ve been reporting on very well.”

“And if we don’t have Elon, they could be up there a long time, who else is going to get them? And I just want to thank him, he’s going through a lot,” Trump said, referencing the uptick in acts of vandalism and violence directed at Tesla properties. 

Williams and Wilmore made it back to Earth on Tuesday after Musk sent a SpaceX Dragon capsule to pick them up. That came after Trump asked Musk in January to “go get” the astronauts after he said they had been “virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration.”

Musk claimed in February that he had offered to bring the astronauts home early “months ago” but that the Biden administration “refused,” delaying their return for “political reasons,” which NASA officials have denied.