NASA will bring space station crew home early after medical problem

Four space station pilots were asked to cut their mission short and return to Earth earlier than planned due to an apparently serious problem. medical issue affecting an unidentified crew memberNASA announced Thursday.

“Yesterday, January 7, only one crew member aboard the station experienced a medical issue and his condition is now stable,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a news conference.

“After discussions with Chief Medical Officer Dr. J.D. Polk and agency leadership, I have decided that it is in the best interest of our astronauts to return Crew 11 before their scheduled departure (in mid-February). … We plan to provide a further update within the next 48 hours as to the planned and anticipated undocking and re-entry schedule.”

In accordance with the agency’s strict medical confidentiality policy, NASA officials did not identify the astronaut in question or provide details about the nature of the medical problem.

But the ailing astronaut is part of NASA’s Crew 11, consisting of Commander Zena Cardman, veteran astronaut Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.

They were launched to the International Space Station on August 1 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry. They planned to return to Earth around February 20, after the arrival of Crew 12’s replacements.

Fincke and Cardman planned to venture outside the space station on Thursday to complete a support truss for an additional solar array and perform various other tasks.

But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the spacewalk had been canceled due to a “medical issue” with one of the astronauts on Crew 11. The agency said the crew member was “stable,” but no further details were provided.

Polk said Thursday that the astronaut in question was not injured or made ill by any operational aspect of life aboard the space station, adding that preparations for the spacewalk played no role in the incident.

Isaacman said the planned early return of Crew 11 did not represent an “emergency,” adding that the agency was simply exercising caution to ensure the astronaut’s health and well-being. Despite this, Crew 11’s anticipated return will mark the first time in American space history that a mission will be aborted due to a medical issue.

Polk acknowledged that this was not an emergency, adding “This is not an injury that occurred during continued operations, but unrelated to the operational environment we currently have. This is primarily a medical issue in the difficult microgravity areas and with the suite of equipment we have available to complete a diagnosis.”

Space station crews have extensive medical equipment on board, and crew members are trained to serve as doctors.

Physician and former astronaut Tom Marshburn told CBS News that space station crews are “equipped to deal with everything that’s happened in space over the 65 years of human spaceflight, all of the things that come up.” Even in extreme examples, like a heart attack, something like that. We have the tools to do it.

“We just can’t keep someone sick for a very long time, just a few days maybe. But just about any medical event you can imagine…could happen up there, yes.”

Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, said Crew 11 would follow normal procedures when returning to Earth where it would splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California. SpaceX support teams and NASA flight surgeons will be present aboard the company’s Crew Dragon recovery ship. The crew will be transported to land by helicopter and then returned by plane to the Johnson Space Center.

“As Dr. Polk mentioned, this is the first time we’ve done a controlled medical evacuation of the vehicle, so it’s unusual,” Kshatriya said. “What’s important to us is the entire crew, and we don’t want to do anything, given the nature of the situation, that would put the crew at additional risk by deviating from our normal processes. That’s why we’re essentially doing an accelerated, controlled return.”

The space station is permanently staffed by a crew of seven people. Three of them take off and return to Earth aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and four fly to and from the laboratory aboard NASA-run SpaceX Crew Dragon ferries.

Both spacecraft serve as lifeboats during a crew’s long-term stay at the space station. If a Soyuz or Crew Dragon plane becomes ill or seriously injured aboard the station, that person is joined by all of their crewmates for the flight back to Earth.

Due to the ever-present risk that a Soyuz or Crew Dragon might have to lift off early, NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, agreed to fly a NASA astronaut aboard each Soyuz and a Russian cosmonaut aboard each Crew Dragon.

Swapping seats ensures that at least one Russian and one American will still be on board the station to operate their respective modules’ equipment if a spacecraft departs earlier and takes all of its crew members with it.

For this reason, after the detachment of Crew 11 from the station, NASA will still have one astronaut – Chris Williams – on board to operate the systems of the laboratory’s American modules. He was launched to the outpost in November aboard a Soyuz spacecraft with two Russian crewmates.

Former volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, Williams was a certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021.

With the departure of Crew 11, Williams would manage the U.S. segment of the space station alone until Crew 12 arrived in February.

Crew 12 Commander Jessica Meir, a space station veteran, recruits Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and veteran cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are scheduled to launch on February 15.

NASA and SpaceX plan to move that launch a few days amid work to prepare a Space Launch System rocket for liftoff as early as Feb. 6 to send four astronauts in a combat loop around the moon.

The high-profile Artemis 2 mission will be the first to send astronauts near the Moon in more than 50 years. Isaacman said he did not think the early return of Crew 11 and the possibly early launch of Crew 12 would have an impact on the lunar mission.