While Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s situation is unusual, their return trip will be pretty routine, as they were already slated to fly home on a SpaceX capsule as part of a scheduled crew rotation.

Then along comes Musk, with one of the world's loudest microphones, shouting that NASA's astronauts are stranded and that President Trump wants them saved. It's a bombshell thing for the founder of SpaceX, who has become a close advisor to Trump, to say publicly.

There are already signs that Elon Musk’s marriage of convenience to President Donald Trump could be a fraught union. Musk turned more than a few heads by taking the lead on defeating a government spending bill last month — Trump doesn’t like being overshadowed — and undercutting a just-announced White House AI project last week.