Stranded NASA Astronauts Return To Earth
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An unexpectedly long mission in space is finally over for two American astronauts. Now they have to get used to gravity again. The big muscles we exercise, but it's the small ones that work in tandem with the big ones that don't get worked very much. And so when you come home, you need all of that set working for you. And so for me, it took about 24 hours because before I could stand easily, I could walk with a normal gait.

And Lisa Brady. A centuries-old wartime law sparks new debate over deportations of gang members and whether a judge can intervene. Maybe the facts will show that this drug cartel is really some kind of actor on behalf of a foreign government that's trying to wage a kind of guerrilla war against us. And I'm Jason Chaffetz. I've got the final word on the Fox News Rundown. ♪

They are back on Earth. And splashdown, Crew 9, back on Earth. Two American astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, finally back home, splashing down around early evening off the Florida coast after a 17-hour ride on a SpaceX capsule.

getting a nice send-off earlier from the replacement crew at the International Space Station. Crew 9, safe journey home. It's been the honor of a lifetime to cross your path up here on Space Station. Williams was sure glad to see that crew show up over the weekend. Houston, thank you for tuning in this early morning. It was a wonderful day. Great to see our friends arrive. She and Wilmore spent more than nine months at the station, but they were only supposed to be there eight days.

However, the new Boeing Starliner spacecraft that took them there last June had technical issues and could not bring them home. Similar to what happened to astronaut Frank Rubio in 2022 when a Russian Soyuz craft had a leak and he was stuck at the station for a record 371 days, a little over a year.

But for Williams and Wilmore, nine months was long enough. You know, they had a great run. It had its adversity and all those things that we've heard about. But now is the time that I look forward to the most.

Clayton Anderson is a retired NASA astronaut known as Astro Clay, who's been up at the space station for long periods of time. He once replaced Sonny Williams there when his crew replaced hers for a 2007 mission. Once I knew that I had a ride home and everything was going well, I could turn my attention to enjoying the moment.

and looking forward to being with my family again. Talk about that ride home. What's it like? They're in this Dragon Space capsule. They're undocked. It takes like, I don't know, 16, 17 hours to get back. What's the journey like back to Earth?

You know, I did it on the shuttle. So it's a little different. There's probably more room on a space shuttle, although it's still pretty cramped because I came home with seven people total. Right. So you don't have a lot of room. They don't either, but they have more windows. But I know that when the drogue shoots come out for the first time, it's a bit of a rough ride.

And I think that your body will, after being in space for nine months, that their body will not like being jerked around by parachutes.

How does it feel of the force as you go through the atmosphere and reenter Earth? On the shuttle, it was very smooth, right? It was like being in a jet airliner. But when gravity starts to take over, your brain knows it and your vestibular system knows it and it doesn't like it. I bet it doesn't. And then you land. And what are you feeling? You've been in space for months.

Now what? How do your legs feel? Your muscles don't work anymore. It's been so long since you have attempted to use most of your small muscles, the big muscles we exercise.

but it's the small ones that work in tandem with the big ones that don't get worked very much. And so when you come home, you need all of that set working for you. And so for me, it took about 24 hours because before I could stand easily, I could walk with a normal gait.

but it would be about three and a half weeks before I could run two miles in the same time or I could lift the same amount of weight on the bench press. And their rehabilitation, since they were there twice as long as me, I'm going to guess that their rehabilitation is going to take twice as long as mine, and mine was about three and a half weeks. So I'm going to say for them six to eight weeks. Any other changes to the body that you notice when you're away from Earth for all this time?

You know, your muscles are weak until you build them back up through rehabilitation. The thing that you don't know about is your bone structure. We had a couple long-duration astronauts in the past who came back. They had rehabilitated. They were declared normal from an athletic standpoint. But one of them jumped off a stage to work on his laptop, you know, when he was giving a presentation to a school and he broke his hip.

Wow. Another one was riding a bicycle and hit a patch of water and the bike slid out from under him and he had a crash and he broke his hip. So...

The piece of this that's unknown, unless you do a bone scan, which we do periodically, is when your bones come back to 100%. And that took me a little over a year. You know, it makes me wonder, there is this aspiration someday to send astronauts to Mars. I mean, that's a really long mission. Do you worry? Exactly. Do you think that's possible for the body?

Yeah, I think it's possible, which is why we're doing a lot of what we're doing today to go back to the moon, to have these guys on long duration missions over time, multiple astronauts. We gather more data on the physicality and the mental impacts to the planet.

to the psych and to the body. And that's the only way we're going to be able to develop the countermeasures that might be needed to do a six to nine month trip just to get to Mars. And you'll probably spend six to nine months on the surface before you spend six to nine months to come home. So we're talking about a potentially a three year trip, right? That's a long time. It is. And we don't know

I think, and this is Clay's opinion, I think we're smarter on the body's physicality and how to fix and work with that. We're smarter on that than we are with the mental aspects of all this. Let's talk about the space station itself. What's the living situation? How big is it for you on a daily basis living there?

You'd be surprised for your listeners, right? You're in microgravity. So there is no down. There is no there is a floor, but you don't have to be on the floor. You're able to do exercise. You're able to enjoy movies. I mean, it's very much like living in a four bedroom house with two kitchenettes.

And when I lived there, it was a three-bedroom house with one kitchenette and one toilet, and now you have two toilets, another key part of this. Yeah, so it's better since you've been there. It's expanded and bigger. Do you have to, like, anchor? You don't watch a movie. You don't want to float the whole time, right? Do you sort of just anchor yourself to something? You do. You can put your feet under a handrail or a footrail. And sometimes we have loops. You know, we create little foot loops that you can just –

stick your foot in. And that's the cool part, right? Is I can lay back and I can put my interlock, my hands behind my head and flat my elbows out like you do on a lawn chair in the, on the beach. Yeah. And you don't need the lawn chair. Yeah.

That's pretty darn cool. It really is. There's no showers for you up there, right, though? Correct. We towel bathe. Showers they tried in the Skylab world. Of course, with no gravity, you can't get the water to drain off your body and go down into a drain. And so the Skylab astronauts had to use a vacuum cleaner to remove the water from their bodies.

We do the same except without a shower. So we use a hot, wet towel with some kind of disinfectant in it. I use the Russian version. And then you clean your body off and then you rinse your body off with another towel and then you dry off before you put your clothes on. That sounds so different, though. That has to take some getting used to.

It did. But I will tell your listeners this, that it was probably one of the best things for me psychologically to clean up. And especially when I had brand new clothes, fresh clothes to put on. It was a huge psychological motivator for me. The food is it is you know, we have this vision of pouches. Everything's in a pouch. Is that really true?

A pouch or cat food can. Yeah. That doesn't sound very appetizing. Well, if you, the Russians and I love the Russian food, I loved it more than the American food because Russians don't take the salt out. They don't take the fat out like the Americans do. And so they don't take a lot of the taste out. And so, um, I enjoyed cracking open a can, which was the size of a cat food can. And it, uh,

Had that little layer of grease on the top, and it was heated in a machine that would allow the can to get hot. And so when you popped it out and when you opened the top and when you stirred all that grease layer down into the food, man, it was really good, like eating a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. That's – see, I can visualize that better than cat food. So I'm glad you used something that I've had before, and I – you know.

I appreciate that. Now, is there any fresh anything that you eat?

We got fresh food in a Russian Progress when I was up there because that was our typical supply vehicle. The problem with fresh food is it has to go through a launch. And if you put bananas and apples and pears in a bag on a rocket, they come up and it looks like somebody attacked it with a ball-peen hammer. Really? Yeah.

Because they get bruised and they get nasty. And, you know, Fyodor, my Russian colleague, he used to send me stuff or pass me stuff down a module, you know, an apple from the progress. And I could never eat it because to me it was gross because it was just so bruised up. I just couldn't do it.

What about sleeping? I mean, I read somewhere there are 16 sunrises and sunsets in a day as you move around the earth. Is that right?

You are correct. An orbit's roughly 90 minutes, so you get a sunset 16 times a day, a sunrise and a sunset. Sleeping was my favorite sport. I could have won an Olympic gold in sleeping in space. And you don't worry about the lighting because, A, my sleep station at that time had no windows. It was very cold with a nice little air conditioning vent, and it was very quiet. Right.

And so sleeping for me, once I got my body and my brain got used to being in space, it came pretty easily. As far as space travel and where we are now, I mean, you talked about being on the shuttle. We don't have shuttles anymore. You know, with NASA. Of course, NASA still has the program and the astronauts, but now we have SpaceX, right?

Boeing has tried. Obviously, the Starliner was their first attempt to bring a capsule to the space station. They had issues with it. They had to send it back unmanned. So Boeing's still trying to figure this out. Do you like the way it's evolving in the space program?

Yeah, I have to say yes. I think that it's important that people keep it in context. Everything that the commercial people are doing, Boeing, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, all of them, they're working to push the envelope forward. And that's a good thing. You know, NASA in all its glory is a bit.

It takes a lot longer to do things, right? We're relying a lot on Congress to make sure we're funded and all those good things.

But I think overall, having guys like Bezos and Musk and Branson pushing the envelope makes it very, very positive for me as I look to the future. Commercial spaceflight is good. Think of us as the Wright brothers. And so we're kind of in the same boat.

with space travel in the commercial world, right? We've got to get the price down so that it's available to many more humans. And then who knows what could happen. He's known as Astro Clay, retired NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson. He's also an adjunct professor now at Iowa State University and president and CEO of the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum, which is in Nebraska.

He's the only astronaut Nebraska has ever had. Clayton, thanks very much for joining us. You bet. My pleasure. Anytime. I'd be honored to be with you anytime.

I'm Dana Perino. This week on Perino on Politics, I'm joined by the founder of the Stewart Group, Don Stewart, to discuss insights on President Trump's latest projects. Available now on FoxNewsPodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. This is Jason Chaffetz with your Fox News commentary coming up.

A law that dates back to 1798 is suddenly playing a prominent role in a legal fight over deportations by the Trump administration. The Alien Enemies Act gives a U.S. president broader authority to arrest and deport non-U.S. citizens during wartime.

It hadn't been invoked in the U.S. since World War II until last weekend, when President Trump used it to deport suspected members of violent foreign gangs, including Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua, or TDA. That statute vests in the president.

full, complete, and plenary authority to remove the alien enemy threat from the United States as expeditiously as possible. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller calls the deportations one of the most successful counter-terrorism operations in American history. Nearly 300 people were on several flights, not

all of them under the Alien Enemies Act, and they were sent to El Salvador, which the White House says is being paid about $6 million for detentions. So when you bring a foreign national into this country illegally, and then we have to remove them and we negotiate with foreign countries for their removal, and we make a deal with those countries, that's

That is a policy issue that the State Department has purview to do. Counselor to the president, Alina Haba, calls pushback from a federal judge ridiculous. The White House says the flights were already in the air when Judge James Boasberg tried to block the deportations and ordered that planes be turned around. President Trump telling Fox's Laura Ingraham. He's radical left. He was Obama appointed. And he actually said we shouldn't be able to take

criminals, killers, murderers, horrible, the worst people, gang members, gang leaders, that we shouldn't be allowed to take them out of our country. Well, that's a presidential job. That's not for a local judge to be making that determination. He says the judge should be impeached. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issuing a statement that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement with a judicial decision. Judge Boasberg is ordering the administration to provide more information on the deportations.

The Alien Enemies Act has not been applied outside of wartime. John Yoo is a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and UC Berkeley Law Professor. I believe the Trump administration's best hope is to argue instead, not that we're in a declared war, but that the United States is suffering an invasion.

and that this invasion by terrorist groups, particularly these violent drug cartels, justifies triggering the act. Now, this has never been tried before by the government, and so there's no judicial cases one way or the other that either accept or reject this theory. But it's going to be up to the courts to have to figure out whether we're actually being invaded

by gangs like MS-13 or Trinidad and Tobago to see whether it would justify then removing those aliens from the country. The Trump administration is arguing that this wartime law, if you will, has been used lawfully to deport suspected members of violent foreign gangs, including the two that you just mentioned.

Does that hinge also on the gangs having been designated as foreign terrorist organizations? Is that a key piece of this? Designating them as foreign terrorist organizations will help, but it's all going to depend on the facts. You know, what are these groups doing? How many of them are in the United States?

Often for things like invasions, wars, use of force, you want to see something they're doing that's just not about making money, as bad as that is in this context, but that they're trying to exert a political influence. They're trying to harm the United States government in some way. Or, and this might be another possibility, they're working behalf of a foreign government. You know, Trinidad and Alagua comes from Venezuela. Venezuela is not a government that's terribly friendly to the United States.

Maybe the facts will show that this drug cartel is really some kind of actor on behalf of a foreign government that's trying to wage a kind of guerrilla war against us. These are all things that we're going to have to learn about as the case moves forward in the courts. In your opinion, does the U.S. government need to prove that?

that the Maduro regime in Venezuela is tied to these gang activities in order to win the legal fight over the deportations. I think it would be extremely important for them to show that it would be easy, make their life a lot easier if the Trump administration could show that there was a nation state relationship.

behind or connected to this terrorist group. Now, that's not a prerequisite. For example, we went to war with the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. That's what I worked on when I was in the Justice Department after the 9/11 attacks. And they were not acting on behalf of a nation. But we decided that the terrorist group itself

was definitely trying to attack the United States to achieve a political outcome, to affect our foreign policy and national security, not really just to make money like organized crime. Where does all of this fit into the broader crackdown on illegal immigration in the U.S.? Because the Trump administration says it's focusing on

Criminals or either, you know, criminal suspects or those who've been convicted of things already trying to get them out of the U.S. in the name of safety.

But, you know, I guess one could argue there's a difference between basic criminals and those who are supposedly part of these gangs. There are differences between acting under the Alien Enemies Act and regular immigration law. I think, as you pointed out, that I suspect most of the people who were removed from the country under the Alien Enemies Act could have ultimately been deported under regular immigration law.

I think the only advantages the Alien Enemies Act perhaps gives is that it allows the government to do it faster. The Trump administration, anyway, is arguing that it doesn't actually need to go to any kind of court to show proof of why it selected certain people for deportation. Whereas in the immigration system, every illegal alien has a right to go to immigration court.

to challenge the government to show its reasons why they're deporting them. So it could lead to faster. I don't know if it ultimately increases the number of people who can ultimately be deported. Do migrants who enter the U.S. illegally in general have constitutional rights in the U.S.?

Oh, yes. The Supreme Court has clearly held that even illegal aliens, once they're on our territory, have a right to due process. Now, the due process right doesn't mean they get to go to federal court right away and say, I'm here, I can't be removed. But generally, the way it works is that Congress has created a series of special immigration courts which act faster and require the government to show

proof and meet standards that are lower than in a normal criminal trial. But once the illegal alien is in the country, they do get some of the basic constitutional rights that citizens get, according to the Supreme Court. Do any of the current court challenges kind of hinge on

Because obviously the Alien Enemies Act court fight, if you will, is not the only one over Trump immigration policies right now. So I'm just wondering if any of them hinge on this basic rights question or if they're all sort of cases centered around more narrow legal questions. I think if you look at the detention of this Columbia graduate student named Khalil,

He is claiming that he's being targeted by the government because of what he says, you know, because of his and he's claiming a right to free speech. And so he's arguing that he doesn't the government can't remove him just because he says things that are unpopular. Now, the immigration laws and I just want to be clear, aliens do not have the same constitutional rights in every regard.

as a citizen. Illegal aliens can be removed from the country, whereas citizens cannot. And I think that his claim, his case will test whether free speech rights apply equally to illegal aliens as they do to citizens and legal aliens.

What are the possible outcomes at this point in this challenge over use of the Alien Enemies Act, especially since last weekend's deportees are already out of the country? Well, the fight's really going to be about whether these deportations under the Alien Enemies Act can continue.

And so I believe that the district judge here, there may be other district judges who will also issue similar orders, halt future flights and say, if you're going to deport these people, you got to do it through the normal immigration laws.

So you're going to get, I think, multiple issues are going to come to the Supreme Court out of this case. One is, as we mentioned earlier, is the Alien Enemies Act actually applicable in a time here where there's no declared war? Is it satisfied by a quote unquote invasion that may or may not have been conducted by drug cartels?

The second thing is how far does a single district judge's power go to supervise or conduct oversight over the executive branch's management of essentially what it says is a military operation? I think those are both very important questions that are going to go up through the appeals court, but I can't see them being decided until they get to the Supreme Court in the end. Right. And that last point,

is crucial, right? Because based on Supreme Court precedent in a couple of cases, there are questions about whether these deportations or executive decisions using the Alien Enemies Act are even subject to judicial review. That is one thing, you know, we don't really know much about the Alien Enemies Act and due process because it's been so long since

since it's last been triggered. But one argument that the Trump administration is making is that once the Alien Enemies Act is triggered, then you don't have this whole process of hearings and immigration courts, that the executive branch can just remove the aliens from the country, just as they would, say, a German citizen

from, not Americans, someone from Germany during World War II or Japan during World War II could just be kicked out of the country right away. That's why whether the act itself applies is so important. Once it applies, it may well be that the courts then have to step aside just as they would for any other military operation.

But you see this ultimately ending up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yes. I mean, unless the judges and the Trump administration both choose to step back from this conflict, I can't. I think it's got to be settled by the Supreme Court because these are unprecedented questions and they do involve the nation's security. John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general, UC Berkeley law professor as well. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. My pleasure. I'm Emily Campagno, host of the Fox True Crime Podcast. This week, award-winning trial attorney and podcast host Joshua Ritter joins me with a look at the Corey Richens murder case. Available now on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Rate and review the Fox News Rundown on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It's time for your Fox News commentary. Jason Chaffetz. What's on your mind?

Following an election in which voters overwhelmingly rejected the fake competence of Vice President Kamala Harris and the fake lucidity of President Joe Biden, Democrats have opted to double down on fake. Choreographed dance videos, duplicate social media posts, contrived town hall protesters, and a sudden newfound aversion to zero emission vehicles all scream insincerity. There is nothing genuine about it.

Voters can see that while Trump and Vance are having fun, Democrats are having conniptions. The contrast is stark. As the president and vice president appear to enjoy their verbal jousting with media and protesters, the progressive left seems to be losing their minds, flailing with fake tears of exasperation. Democrats can't fake cool.

The reality is their leaders come across childish, insincere, desperate, not to mention old, tired, grumpy, and totally out of touch. Who can relate to the likes of Schumer, Sanders, Durbin, and Warren? Meanwhile, their protesters have lost the plot, projecting an embrace of violence, lawlessness, and government corruption.

The party offers no home for traditional liberal Democrats, working-class people, privacy advocates, anti-war leftists, or Israel-supporting Jews. Their carefully curated and choreographed messaging bears no resemblance to the urgent demands of a year ago. Supposedly, Democrats were all about electric vehicles. Not anymore. Now the message has reversed. Alas, their fealty to electric cars was also fake.

Teslas are now bad. Protesting and destroying them is good. Chaos is fine when they do it. Democratic women at the joint session of Congress wore pink, in theory, to support women. But they can't define what a woman is. Nor could they possibly support excluding men from participating in women's sports. Their fake support of women falls apart when they actually have to stand for women.

In 2024, they defended censorship to deal with misinformation on social media. Now they care deeply about free speech of Hamas supporters, a designated terrorist organization on U.S. soil. Videos circulate of Democrats who previously criticized waste, fraud and abuse now fighting to keep the gravy train running.

We can all see that they've done a 180 from opposing to defending waste. The duplicity is lost on no one. Voters are finished with the Democrats' choreographed and curated leadership model. But their consultants, some of whom are their family members, are getting rich. But their efforts to rebuild and refresh their party are going backwards. The party's whole premise was based on division and class warfare.

It was not about the very principles that make our country great. Far be it for me to give the Democrats advice. As long as they keep doing what they're doing, the Republic is likely safe from their fake leadership. I'm Jason Chaffetz, Fox News contributor and host of the Jason in the House podcast.

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