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NASA bumps two astronauts from upcoming flight to give Starliner crew a ride home in February
NASA has bumped two female astronauts, including the commander, from the next SpaceX crew rotation flight to the International Space Station, freeing up two seats to give the agency’s Starliner astronauts a ride home next February.
Rookie Crew 9 commander Zena Cardman and veteran Stephanie Wilson will remain behind when the Crew Dragon ferry ship takes off from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sept. 24 carrying crewmate Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov.
SpaceX
Also on board: clothing, supplies and SpaceX pressure suits for Starliner commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and co-pilot Sunita Williams, whose originally planned eight-day test flight reached its 86th day on Friday. By the time they land aboard the Crew 9 capsule next February, they will have logged more than 262 days in space.
Hague, a Space Force colonel, former F-16 test pilot and combat veteran who logged 203 days in space on an earlier mission, was originally assigned as Cardman’s co-pilot. He now will take on the role of mission commander, assisted by Gorbunov.
Gorbunov kept his seat aboard the Crew 9 Dragon as part of an ongoing program in which Russian Soyuz spacecraft carry one NASA astronaut on each flight to the ISS and a cosmonaut launches on each Crew Dragon.
That ensures each country always has at least one crew member on board the lab even if an emergency forces one ferry ship and its crew to make an unplanned return to Earth. But Gorbunov is not trained to serve as a Crew Dragon pilot and will retain his original “mission specialist” designation.
The decision on who would fly aboard the Crew 9 mission and who would stay behind was made by NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba. While he did not explain his reasoning in a NASA statement announcing the decision, Hague’s spaceflight experience clearly made the difference.
NASA
“While we’ve changed crew before for a variety of reasons, downsizing crew for this flight was another tough decision to adjust to given that the crew has trained as a crew of four,” he said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence in all our crew. … Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch.”
In the same statement, Cardman said: “I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right.”
NASA originally intended to launch Cardman, Hague, Wilson and Gorbunov earlier this month on a normal six-month tour of duty, replacing three other astronauts and a cosmonaut — Crew 8 — wrapping up their own half-year stay aboard the station.
But the Crew 9 flight was held up while NASA managers debated whether Boeing’s Starliner capsule, launched June 5 on the ship’s first piloted test flight, could safely bring its two crew members home in the wake of multiple helium leaks and thruster problems shortly after launch June 5.
Playing it safe, agency managers decided on Aug. 24 to keep Wilmore and Williams on board the station for an extended stay and to bring the Boeing spacecraft back to Earth by remote control. That left Crew Dragon as the only ship available to take Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.
The Starliner is now expected to undock from the space station on Sept. 6, setting up an uncrewed landing at White Sands, N.M., late that night.
The Crew 9 launch is the first step in a complex sequence of flights to replace the station’s seven long-duration crew members with a fresh set of astronauts and cosmonauts.
The Russians plan to launch two cosmonauts, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, along with NASA astronaut Donald Pettit to the lab complex on Sept. 11. Cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA’s Tracy Dyson then will return to Earth on Sept. 23, the day before the two-man Crew 9 takes off.
Kononenko and Chub are wrapping up a full year in orbit and will have logged 374 days aloft at touchdown. Kononenko also will set a new record for the most time in space across multiple flights: 1,111 days.
The four Crew 8 fliers — Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin — are expected to head home on Oct. 1 to complete the crew rotation sequence.
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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