International Space Station crew set to return to Earth
Marcia Dunn
Cape Canaveral, Florida: An astronaut needing the care of doctors left the International Space Station with his three crew members during NASA’s first medical evacuation.
Returning astronauts from the US, Russia and Japan are expected to land in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Thursday evening (AEDT). The decision shortened their mission by more than a month.
“The timing of this departure is unexpected, but what wasn’t surprising to me was how well this team came together as a family to help each other and just take care of each other,” NASA astronaut Zena Cardman said before the return trip.
Officials last week declined to identify the astronaut who needed care and did not disclose the nature of the health concerns.
Space station commander Mike Fincke said via social media this week that the ailing astronaut was “sound, safe and well cared for.” “This was a deliberate decision to allow accurate medical assessments to be made where all diagnostic capacity was available.”
Launched in August, Cardman, Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov were supposed to remain on the space station until the end of February. However, on January 7, NASA abruptly canceled Cardman and Fincke’s spacewalk the next day and later announced the crew’s early return.
Officials said the health issue was unrelated to spacewalk preparations or other station operations but gave no further details, citing medical privacy. They emphasized that it was not an emergency.
The splashdown is expected to occur at 7.41pm (AEDT) on Thursday. NASA’s live broadcast will begin at 6.15pm AEDT.
NASA said it would stick to the same entry and ejection procedures at the end of the flight, with the usual assortment of medical experts aboard the rescue ship in the Pacific.
This will be another midnight crew return for SpaceX, occurring less than 11 hours after departing the space station. Because the spacecraft’s orbit is aligned with the landing point, they will remain in orbit for more than nine hours.
NASA said it wasn’t yet known how fast all four would fly from California to Houston, home to the Johnson Space Center and the astronauts’ base.
One American and two Russian astronauts stayed in the orbiting laboratory for 1.5 months of the eight-month mission, which began with the lift-off of the Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. NASA and SpaceX are working to expedite the launch of a new four-person crew from Florida, currently targeting mid-February.
Computer modeling predicted that a medical evacuation from the space station would occur every three years, but NASA has conducted no such evacuations in 65 years of human spaceflight.
The Russians were not so lucky. In 1985, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Vasyutin crashed aboard his country’s Salyut 7 space station with a serious infection or related illness, leading to an early return. Several other Soviet cosmonauts experienced less serious health problems that shortened their flights.
These were the first spaceflights for Cardman, a 38-year-old biologist and polar explorer who missed the spacewalk, and Platonov, a 39-year-old former fighter pilot in the Russian Air Force who had to wait a few more years to go into space due to an undisclosed health problem.
Cardman was supposed to launch last year, but crashed during landing to make room for NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stranded on the space station for almost a year due to Boeing’s capsule problems.
Fincke, 58, a retired Air Force colonel, and Yui, 55, a retired fighter pilot with the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, were repeat space pilots. Fincke spent more than a year in orbit on four missions and performed nine spacewalks on previous flights, making him one of NASA’s top performers. Last week, Yui celebrated her 300th day in space with a two-station stay, sharing spectacular views of Earth, including Mount Fuji in Japan and the breathtaking aurora borealis.
“I want to burn it into my eyes and even more into my heart,” Yui said on social platform X. “Soon I’ll be one of those little lights on the ground.”
NASA officials had said leaving an astronaut in space for another month without proper medical attention was riskier than temporarily reducing the size of the space station crew by more than half.
Until SpaceX sends another crew, NASA has said it should pull back from routine and even emergency spacewalks, a two-person job that requires backup assistance from crew members inside the orbital complex.
The medevac was the first major decision made by NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman. The billionaire founder of a payment processing company and two-time spaceflighter took on the agency’s top job in December.
“The health and well-being of our astronauts is and will always remain our top priority,” he said.
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