Posts by President Trump and Elon Musk roiled the space community, raising the prospect of an earlier-than-planned return for the Starliner crew.

NASA’s two stuck astronauts took their first spacewalk together Thursday, exiting the International Space Station almost eight months after moving in. Commander Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore removed a broken antenna and wiped the station’s exterior for evidence of any microbes that might still be alive after launching from Earth and escaping through vents.

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.

Liftoff is scheduled for 8:34 p.m. ET tonight (Jan. 29).

SpaceX and Vast Space are looking for research ideas to fly aboard Vast's new Haven-1 space station launching later this year.

SpaceX on Wednesday night launched a Spanish communications satellite from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and retired the first-stage booster rather than landing on a drone.

So the return of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore has never been a political story—until this week. And it's a good thing that the two will be in space tomorrow because, as attested to in the tagline for the movie Alien, in space, no one can hear you scream.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station to swab the orbiting lab for evidence of microorganisms.

SpaceX sent up the Space Coast’s 10th launch of the year Wednesday night, but skipped any landing attempt of its booster. A Falcon 9 rocket on the SpainSat NG I mission carrying a communications satellite developed by Spanish company Hisdesat and the European Space Agency lifted off at 8:34 p.

NASA affirmed on Wednesday a plan it set last year to work with Elon Musk's SpaceX in returning two astronauts from the International Space Station, saying it will do so "as soon as practical," the day after President Donald Trump suggested he wants a quicker return for the crew.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said President Trump has asked the company to bring home the two NASA astronauts from Boeing’s Starliner mission on board the ISS “as soon as possible.”