NASA to bring back Crew-11 early from space station : NPR

NASA has announced that it will return all four members of its Crew-11 mission to Earth sooner. One of them suffers from a health problem. The crew, shown here at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 1, 2025, is (from left): Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, NASA astronaut and mission commander Zena Cardman, and JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui.

Gregg Newton/AFP via Getty Images

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Gregg Newton/AFP via Getty Images

NASA has aborted a mission to the International Space Station due to a medical issue with a crew member. The agency plans to send back the four members of the Crew-11 mission more than a month early. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the crew would return to Earth “in the coming days.”

NASA did not release the crew member’s name or illness, citing health privacy. Isaacman described it as a “serious medical problem.”

NASA first acknowledged what it called a “medical concern” on Wednesday, when it announced the cancellation of a spacewalk planned for Thursday. Two NASA astronauts, Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, were supposed to venture outside the orbiting laboratory and update the station’s electrical system. The additional energy from the new solar panels would allow the station to be safely deorbited when it is decommissioned in 2030.

The two NASA astronauts, along with a Japanese Space Station astronaut and a Russian Space Agency cosmonaut, are members of NASA’s Crew-11 mission that launched to the space station from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 1, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Typically, station crews spend approximately six to eight months living and working on the station. The next crew rotation is not expected to launch until next month.

The decision to abort the mission for health reasons is a first for NASA in 65 years of human spaceflight, according to Robert Pearlman, editor-in-chief of the space history information site. collectSpace.com.

“While this has always been a contingency that the agency has always considered, NASA has never had to abort a mission before due to an astronaut’s illness,” he said. “Crew members had medical issues in space, but they never got to a high enough level to return home early.”

The decision to bring back the four crew members was made by NASA leadership and with input from the crew’s flight surgeons. NASA said it prioritized the call with the safety of the crew members above all else.

Paul Dye, a former flight controller who worked on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions, said that’s how teams approach any issues when it comes to crew health and safety.

“In flight, you do what is necessary for the safety of the crew and then for the success of the mission,” he said. “The safety of the crew comes first, and if the only answer is to bring them home, then you bring them home.”

Although Dye and NASA flight controllers have never had to perform a medical evacuation of a crew, he said the team is training for the possibility.

“It’s actually pretty mundane from a muscle memory standpoint, if you will, or mental muscle memory,” Dye said, “because we work on that stuff all the time in practice.”

Once they leave, there will be only three people aboard the International Space Station, which will affect station operations. The three include the two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut from a previous Soyuz mission. A new SpaceX crew is not expected to launch until February to help keep the massive orbiting laboratory running.

“It’s a big problem,” said Don Platt, a professor at Florida Tech and former International Space Station engineer. “That means that basically the crew members who are there are just focused on making sure that the space station can continue to operate and take care of any maintenance needs that they might have. A lot of the science work will have to be postponed.”

The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by humans since 2000. The fact that there have been no major medical incidents is partly due to the training that astronauts and cosmonauts receive before launching to the ISS.

“We actually get quite a bit of training on all the equipment available to the entire crew,” said retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, who spent more than three months living and working on the station. “The primary interest is of course to be able to respond to someone who might find themselves in an emergency situation.”

This includes first aid equipment specifically designed to provide medical aid in the microgravity environment of space, suturing equipment, a suite of pharmaceutical treatments and even equipment to perform dental procedures.

“With the support of our ground team, our flight surgeons and the people on the ground who we can communicate very well with, we can do a lot of assisted and guided procedures up there,” Scott said.. “We are very well stocked and supported that way. »