No, Elon Musk didn’t say the Boeing Starliner astronauts ‘won’t come back’

In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams rocketed to the International Space Station aboard the new Boeing Starliner spacecraft. It was the spacecraft’s first crewed test flight, but a couple of months later, NASA announced it was bringing the Starliner back to Earth without the astronauts because of spacecraft safety troubles.

Wilmore and Williams will remain at the Space Station through February 2025, NASA said in an Aug. 24, 2024, press release, and then fly home aboard another spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to a SpaceX mission. 

A recent Facebook post claims SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the astronauts "won’t come back" and suggested they’re dead. 

"Elon Musk: ‘The Boeing Starliners stranded astronauts are not with us anymore,’" the Jan. 4 post said. "‘They won’t come back.’"

But the astronauts aren’t dead, and we found no evidence Musk said this.

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stated on December 10, 2024 in an Instagram post

“Dr. Assad will return to ophthalmology after being deposed as president of Syria and plans to set up an eye clinic in Russia.”

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

We found no news coverage or public statements from Musk to corroborate the quotes attributed to him in this post. 

In December, NASA announced Wilmore and Williams would return after the agency’s new SpaceX crew arrived at the space station. 

NASA said that would happen in late March at the earliest so that the agency and SpaceX would have time to finish a new spacecraft for the mission. 

We rate claims Musk said the astronauts "are not with us anymore" and "won’t come back" False.