Last week, NASA announced that it had postponed a January 8 spacewalk after a crew member suffered a medical incident on board the International Space Station. The agency said at the time that the “matter involved a single crew member who is stable.”
Roughly a day later, NASA held a news conference, officially announcing the first medical evacuation in the space station’s 25-year history.
The four Crew-11 astronauts, who arrived at the station in early August, were originally scheduled to return to Earth next month. However, thanks to the medical incident, they boarded their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule weeks early on Wednesday afternoon, safely splashing down off the coast of San Diego in the early morning hours of Thursday.
“For over 60 years, NASA has set the standard for safety and security in crewed spaceflight,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman at last week’s news conference. “In these endeavors, including the 25 years of continuous human presence on board the International Space Station, the health and the well-being of our astronauts is always and will be our highest priority.”
That means the space station has gone from seven crew members down to a “skeleton crew” of three: NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev, who arrived at the station in November on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Its largest crew, a whopping 13 astronauts, was set back in 2009.
“Despite all the changes and all the difficulties, we are going to do our job onboard ISS, performing all the scientific tasks, maintenance tasks here, whatever happens,” said Kud-Sverchkov on Monday.
“Chris [Williams] is trained to do every task that we would ask him to do on the vehicle,” NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters last week, noting that “he will have thousands of people looking over his shoulder.”
While it’s a rare occurrence, it’s not the first time the station has been this short-staffed. There have been several instances of having just three astronauts take care of the aging orbital outpost. As the New York Times points out, there have even been times when the station was taken care of by just two crew members as well — though mostly during the early days of the station, when it was much smaller.
For instance, following the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the ISS crew was reduced to just two.
Per Ars Technica, the station’s “nominal” crew size was upgraded to six and seven in 2009 and 2020, respectively.
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