For the first time ever, NASA has been forced to cut a mission to the International Space Station short due to a “serious medical condition” affecting a crew member.
The four Crew-11 astronauts, who arrived at the station in early August, will now be returning a month early on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. All four crew members must return together, since they all rely on the same spacecraft for transportation and a place to hide out in case of an emergency.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about what occurred. On Thursday, NASA held a news conference to discuss the situation, insisting that the crew member was “stable” and that “due to medical privacy,” it wouldn’t be “appropriate for NASA to share more details about the crew member.”
The agency, however, revealed that the unidentified crew member did not sustain an injury and was “totally unrelated” to any space operations, including a Wednesday spacewalk that was unexpectedly cancelled.
Recently sworn-in NASA administrator Jared Isaacman made the announcement that the Crew-11 mission would be cutting their time on board the aging orbital outpost short. It’s likely the biggest decision he’s had to make during his extremely short tenure as the agency’s head.
More information about a more detailed timeline will be released within the next 48 hours.
“After discussions with our chief health and medical officer, Dr. JD Polk, and leadership across the agency, I’ve come to the decision that it’s in the best interests of our astronauts to return Crew-11 ahead of their planned departure,” he said.
Polk also insisted that “because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergency evacuation.”
“We’re not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down,” he added.
It’s a historic moment for the space station. Despite having been continuously inhabited since the year 2000, there has never been an early evacuation, as the BBC points out. According to Polk, early predictive models concluded a medical evacuation would happen once every three years — not 25.
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