The two astronauts stuck in orbit for months were just fired as part of DOGE budget reductions. The original marooning of the astronauts happened when their Boeing Starliner capsule lost a door on the way to orbit. Or sprang a leak, or something Boeing-esque.

“We got this email asking us to list five things we did last week and I complied,” explained astronaut Suni Williams. “Then some person named Big Balls said he, or she, was not happy with my accomplishments and let me go.”

Here are Williams’ five bullet points.

• Floated around in zero gravity watching my hair fan out in a mirror.
• Fed gerbils cocaine in zero gravity to see what would happen (It was an NSF funded “experiment”).
• Fed co-astronaut Butch Wilmore cocaine in zero gravity to see what would happen and he ate a gerbil.
• Got mad at Butch and took a space walk for 8 hours to give him the silent treatment. (He knows what he did.) Would have come back in sooner but could not find my keys – turns out they were in my space purse all along.
• Floated around in zero gravity watching my hair fan out in a mirror.

“What did Mr. Balls expect?,” Suni said, exasperated. “We were only supposed to be up here a few hours, not months. We had to make up all kinds of crappy experiments just to justify our funding. So, we’re kind of a USAID in space.”

When asked if they could afford to pay for a ride down in the soon to arrive SpaceX capsule, the astronauts said Elon Musk offered low interest financing but they refused as a protest against Elon’s DOGE.

“I wouldn’t ride in a SpaceX capsule if it was the only working human rated spaceship in America capable of reaching the space station,” Suni said.

Which it is.

“We’re going to have to stay another six months or a year,” Butch explained, “until Boeing patches up its Starliner. Then they’re going to pay us a bonus to ride in it since no one else will.”

At publication time the stuck astronauts were waiting to hear about their application to the National Science Foundation to study the effect of feeding cocaine to trans-gender beagle puppies in zero gravity.