President Trump has offered to pay overtime out of his pocket for the two NASA astronauts who recently returned to Earth after an unexpected eight-month stint at the International Space Station.
Mr. Trump learned from a reporter Friday that Suni Williamson and Butch Wilmore, who set off into space in June for an expected eight-day test flight on Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft but ended up orbiting Earth 278 days longer than anticipated, did not receive any overtime pay.
When Mr. Trump heard they were to be paid $5 a day per diem for 286 days, which equals $1,430 in extra pay, he said that it was the first time the matter was ever brought to his attention.
“Nobody’s ever mentioned this to me. If I have to, I’ll pay it out of my own pocket. OK? Is that all?” he said. “That’s not a lot for what they had to go through. And I want to thank Elon Musk, by the way, because think of [if] we don’t have him.”
Mr. Musk founded SpaceX, which retrieved the astronauts this week.
Mr. Trump said an astronaut’s body “starts to deteriorate after nine or 10 months” in space.
The capsule, carrying NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore as well as Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, returned to Earth from the ISS on Wednesday.
Issues with the Starliner and NASA’s desire to keep the ISS properly crewed kept them in space until early Tuesday, when the SpaceX Dragon capsule undocked.
Mr. Hague and Mr. Gorbunov were in space for their scheduled amount of time as part of the Crew-9 mission to conduct scientific experiments on the ISS. They first docked at the station on Sept. 29.
