CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An ailing astronaut returned to Earth with three others on Thursday, ending their International Space Station mission more than a month early in NASA’s first medical evacuation, the agency and SpaceX said.
SpaceX guided the capsule to a middle-of-the-night splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego, less than 11 hours after the astronauts exited the space station. The astronauts’ first stop after recovery was a hospital for an overnight stay.
NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman said the early return was taken because of the medical situation. “Obviously, we took this action (early return) because it was a serious medical condition,” Isaacman said after splashdown. He added: “The astronaut in question is fine right now, in good spirits and going through the proper medical checks.”
The mission began in August and left the orbiting lab with only one American and two Russians on board. NASA and SpaceX said they would try to move up the launch of a fresh crew of four, with liftoff targeted for mid-February.
Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke were joined on the return by Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov. Officials refused to identify the astronaut who developed the health problem last week or to explain what happened, citing medical privacy.
NASA said it wanted the astronaut back on Earth as soon as possible for proper care and diagnostic testing. Officials said the entry and splashdown required no special changes or accommodations, and that the recovery ship had its usual allotment of medical experts aboard.
After splashdown, the astronauts emerged from the capsule one by one within an hour. They were helped onto reclining cots and whisked away for standard medical checks, while waving to cameras. Isaacman monitored the action from Mission Control in Houston, along with the crew’s families.
NASA decided a few days earlier to take the entire crew straight to a San Diego-area hospital after splashdown, and practiced helicopter runs there from the recovery ship. NASA said the astronaut in question would receive in-depth medical checks before flying with the rest of the crew back to Houston on Friday, assuming everyone was well enough; Platonov’s return to Moscow was unclear.
In orbit, NASA stressed repeatedly over the past week that the situation was not an emergency. The astronaut fell sick or was injured on Jan. 7, prompting NASA to call off the next day’s spacewalk by Cardman and Fincke and ultimately leading to the early return. NASA said it was the first time the agency cut short a spaceflight for medical reasons, while noting that the Russians had done so decades ago.
Isaacman said spacewalk preparations did not lead to the medical situation, but that it was too early to draw conclusions about other possible causes. “it would be very premature to draw any conclusions or close any doors at this point.” He also said it was unknown whether the same thing could have happened on Earth.
NASA said it will be unable to perform a spacewalk, even for an emergency, until the arrival of the next crew, which has two Americans, one French and one Russian astronaut. Isaacman said it was too soon to know whether the launch of station reinforcements would take priority over NASA’s first moonshot with astronauts in more than a half-century.
For now, NASA said it is working in parallel on both missions, with limited overlap of personnel. Isaacman said if NASA has to deconflict between the two human spaceflight missions, “that is a very good problem to have at NASA.”
The moon rocket is scheduled to move to the pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center this weekend, with a fueling test planned by early next month. Until those steps are completed, NASA said a launch date cannot be confirmed; the earliest the moon flyaround could take off is Feb. 6.