NASA astronaut says medical scare in space remains a mystery
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The astronaut who caused NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell ill on the International Space Station.
Four-time space pilot Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner Jan. 7 after preparing for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t speak and doesn’t remember any pain, but his anxious teammates sprang into action after seeing him in distress and sought help from flight surgeons on the ground.
“It was completely unexpected. It was just incredibly fast,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted about 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he always does it. He had never experienced anything like this before or since.
Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be linked to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 1/2 months into his last stay on a space station when the problem struck like “a very, very quick lightning bolt.”
“My teammates clearly saw that I was in distress,” he said, all six of them crowding around him. “Everyone was on deck in just a few seconds. »
Fincke said he could not provide further details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure other astronauts don’t feel like their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.
The space station’s ultrasound machine came in handy when the event occurred, he said, and it has undergone extensive testing since returning to Earth. NASA is reviewing medical records of other astronauts to see if similar cases could have occurred in space, he said.
Fincke identified himself late last month as the one who was ill to end swirling public speculation.
He still feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be canceled – it would have been his 10th spacewalk but the first for teammate Zena Cardman – and resulted in an early return for her and their two other teammates. SpaceX brought them back on January 15, more than a month early, and they went straight to the hospital.
“I was very lucky to be in very good health, so it was very surprising for everyone,” he said.
Fincke stopped apologizing to everyone after new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman ordered him to stop.
“It wasn’t you. It was space, wasn’t it?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anyone down.”
Always optimistic, he hopes to one day return to space.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
