‘Serious medical condition’ prompts NASA to bring ISS crew home early
It’s the first time in NASA’s history that an astronaut mission has been cut short in such circumstances.
NASA
NASA has made the rare move of cutting short a crewed mission to the ISS. An undisclosed medical issue with an unnamed crew member has prompted NASA to bring home SapceX’s Crew-11 in the coming days, the agency announced at a press conference on Thursday.
The decision followed news on Wednesday that NASA had called off a spacewalk, which was set to take place early on Thursday, due to “a medical situation aboard the International Space Station [involving] a single crew member who is stable.”
Jared Isaacman, the new NASA chief, said at the press conference that it was he who made the decision to bring the crew home early, describing the issue as a “serious medical condition.”
The spacewalk was set to be conducted by NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman.
Crew-11, comprising Fincke, Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russia’s Oleg Platonov, arrived in orbit in August 2025 and were due to return to Earth in late February.
While astronaut missions have sometimes lasted longer than expected, or been shortened due to technical issues, the rescheduling of Crew-11 marks the first time in NASA’s history that an astronaut mission has been cut short in such circumstances.
Speaking at Thursday’s news conference, Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, said that while ISS astronauts have access to “a very robust suite of medical hardware … we don’t have the complete amount of hardware that I would have in the emergency department, for example, to complete a workup of a patient.”
Polk added: “In this particular incident, we would like to complete that workup, and the best way to complete that workup is on the ground.”
The early departure of Crew-11 astronauts return will leave Chris Williams as the only NASA astronaut aboard the orbital outpost. Williams arrived at the ISS just over a month ago with cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev on a Russian Soyuz capsule. They’ll be joined by four more astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-12 in mid-February.
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
After the fireworks: The everyday journey of a Falcon 9 space rocket
A rocket’s life away from the limelight.
SpaceX has been landing the first stage of its workhorse Falcon 9 booster since 2015, and the sight of the vehicle coming in for an upright touchdown, engines blazing, never gets old.
Most of the landings take place on a droneship waiting in the ocean, though occasionally SpaceX also lands the booster back near the launch site.
You won’t see a weirder rocket launch than this Falcon 9 flying in fog
Despite the lack of visibility for mission controllers, fog rarely poses a problem for rocket launches.
SpaceX livestreams every single one of its rocket launches, most of them involving its workhorse Falcon 9 vehicle.
The vast majority of the Falcon 9 launches take place from Florida’s Space Coast, but the company also uses Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for occasional missions.
NASA’s ‘Moonbound’ builds the hype for its epic Artemis II mission
The first episode is free to view on NASA’s website.
With NASA’s first launch toward the moon in five decades potentially only a few months away, the space agency has just released the first episode of a new show that focuses on the highly anticipated mission.
Moonbound — Charting the Course runs for 22 minutes and offers a deep dive into the preparations being made for the 10-day Artemis II flight, which will see four astronauts fly around the moon and back again.
