NASA will bring space station crew home early after medical issue

Four space station fliers have been told to cut their mission short and return to Earth ahead of schedule because of an apparently serious medical issue affecting an unidentified crew member, NASA announced Thursday.

"Yesterday, January 7, a single crew member on board the station experienced a medical situation and is now stable," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference.

"After discussions with Chief Health and Medical Officer Dr. J.D. Polk and leadership across the agency, I've come to the decision that it's in the best interest of our astronauts to return Crew 11 ahead of their planned departure (in mid February). ... We expect to provide a further update within the next 48 hours as to the expected, anticipated undock and re-entry timeline."

In keeping with the agency's strict medical privacy policy, NASA officials have not identified the astronaut in question or provided any details about the nature of the medical issue.

But the ailing astronaut is a member of NASA's Crew 11, made up 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 Aug. 1 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ship. They were planning to return to Earth around Feb. 20, after their Crew 12 replacements arrive.

Fincke and Cardman were planning to venture outside the space station on Thursday to complete a support truss for an add-on solar array and to carry out a variety of other tasks.

But on Wednesday, NASA announced the spacewalk had been called off due to a "medical concern" with one of the Crew 11 astronauts. The agency said the crew member was "stable," but no other details were provided.

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

Isaacman said the planned early return of Crew 11 did not represent an "emergency," adding the agency was simply erring on the side of caution to ensure the health and well-being of the astronaut. Even so, Crew 11's early return will mark the first time in U.S. space history that a mission has been cut short due to a medical issue.

Polk agreed it was not an emergency, adding "This is not an injury that occurred in the pursuit of operations, but unrelated to the operational environment that we have right now. It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and with the suite of hardware that we have at our disposal available to complete a diagnosis."

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

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

"We just can't sustain somebody sick for a really long period of time, just for a few days, perhaps. But pretty much any medical event that you can imagine ... could happen up there, yeah."

Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, said Crew 11 will follow normal procedures when returning to Earth where they will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast. SpaceX support crews and NASA flight surgeons will be standing by aboard the company's Crew Dragon recovery ship. The crew will be flown to shore by helicopter and then fly by jet back to the Johnson Space Center.

"As Dr. Polk mentioned, it's the first time we've done a controlled medical evacuation from the vehicle, so that is unusual," Kshatriya said. "What's important to us is the whole crew, and we don't want to do anything, given the nature of the condition, that we put any other additional risk on the crew by diverging from our normal processes. So that's why we're doing essentially a controlled expedited return."

The space station is continuously staffed by a crew of seven. Three launch and return to Earth aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft and four fly to and from the lab aboard NASA-managed SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ships.

Both spacecraft serve as lifeboats during a crew's long-duration space station stay. If a Soyuz or Crew Dragon flier gets sick or is seriously injured aboard the station, that person is joined by all of his or her crewmates for the flight back to Earth.

Because of the ever-present chance that a Soyuz or Crew Dragon might have to depart early, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, agreed to fly one NASA astronaut aboard each Soyuz and one Russian cosmonaut aboard each Crew Dragon.

The seat-swap arrangement ensures that at least one Russian and one American are always on board the station to operate equipment in their respective modules should one spacecraft depart early and take all its crew members with it.

For that reason, after Crew 11 undocks from the station, NASA will still have one astronaut — Chris Williams — aboard to operate systems in the lab's U.S. modules. He was launched to the outpost in November aboard a Soyuz spacecraft along with two Russian crewmates.

A one-time volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, Williams was a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when selected to join NASA's astronaut corps in 2021.

With the departure of Crew 11, Williams would be on his own managing the U.S. segment of the space station until Crew 12 arrives in February.

Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, a space station veteran, rookies Jack Hathaway and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and veteran cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are scheduled for launch Feb. 15.

NASA and SpaceX are looking into moving that launch up a few days amid work to ready a Space Launch System rocket for takeoff as early as Feb. 6 to send four astronauts on a looping fight around the moon.

The high-profile Artemis 2 mission will be the first to send astronauts to the vicinity of 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 any impact on the moon mission.

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