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NASA announced on Thursday that it will return four astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) more than a month ahead of schedule due to a medical issue. This marks the first medical evacuation in the station’s 25-year history. While agency officials confirmed the situation is currently "stable," they declined to release specific details regarding the nature of the condition or the identity of the affected crew member, citing medical privacy protocols.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a news briefing that the astronauts will return home in the coming days. The agency has not yet given a precise timeline for undocking or landing.
“After discussions with the 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 interest of our astronauts to return Crew-11 ahead of their planned departure,” Isaacman said.
Isaacman added that further updates will be provided over the next 48 hours.
The group leaving the International Space Station are NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. The astronauts, known as Crew-11, arrived there in early August and had been expected to stay aboard the orbiting laboratory until late February.
Polk said that the situation is stable and that the evacuation is not considered an emergency. Rather, he said, the decision was made to err on the side of caution for the affected astronaut’s health and welfare.
“We have a very robust suite of medical hardware onboard the International Space Station, but we don’t have the complete amount of hardware that I would have in the emergency department, for example, to complete a workup of the patient,” Polk said. “And in this particular incident, the medical incident was sufficient enough that we were concerned about the astronaut that we would like to complete that workup.”
NASA first made the medical issue public Wednesday, when it announced that it was postponing a spacewalk Cardman and Fincke were scheduled to conduct Thursday.
The next crew members are scheduled to launch to the ISS in mid-February, but Isaacman said NASA will evaluate whether to bump up that mission, known as Crew-12.
