NASA to Bring ISS Crew Home Early Because of an Astronaut's Health Issue, Marking the First Medical Evacuation of the Spacecraft

Margherita Bassi - Daily Correspondent

Humans have continuously lived and worked aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since November 2000. NASA

NASA is bringing SpaceX Crew-11 back to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) a month early because of a medical situation involving one of its four crew members. The event marks the first medical evacuation from the ISS in its 25 years of operation.

The space agency didn’t release the name or specific condition of the astronaut in question for privacy reasons. The medical issue took place on Wednesday, and the individual is now stable, according to officials.

While this was a “serious medical condition,” the early return does not constitute an “emergency deorbit,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said yesterday during a press briefing. But “the capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station.”

James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, agreed. “The medical incident was sufficient enough that we were concerned about the astronaut,” and wanted to run some medical tests, he said during the press briefing. “The best way to complete that … is on the ground,” where the patient will have access to more health tools.

Crew-11 consists of four crew members: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke,  Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. They launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft on August 1, 2025, and arrived at the ISS the following day.

Need to know: How far is the ISS from Earth?

The ISS orbits Earth from roughly 250 miles away from the planet’s surface. A spacecraft can reach the station as soon as four hours after launching.

On Wednesday, NASA announced that it would postpone a spacewalk slated for Thursday, citing a medical incident involving a crew member that occurred on Wednesday afternoon. Following conversations with Polk and other leadership at the agency, Isaacman concluded that “it’s in the best interest of our astronauts” to bring Crew-11 back to Earth “within the coming days,” he said during the press briefing.

Isaacman added that NASA and its partners are considering moving up the launch date of SpaceX Crew-12, which is currently planned for as early as mid-February. Between Crew-11’s departure and the next SpaceX group’s arrival, NASA astronaut Chris Williams will be the only American residing on the station. He’ll stay there with two Roscosmos cosmonauts, who arrived with him at the orbiter in late November.  

Having only three people aboard the ISS is “a significant problem,” Don Platt, a space systems expert at the Florida Institute of Technology and former ISS engineer, tells Brendan Byrne at NPR’s All Things Considered. “That means, basically, the crew members that are there are pretty much just concentrating on making sure the space station can continue to run. ... A lot of the science will have to be postponed.”

Still, it’s “amazing that we’ve maintained the ISS for [almost] 26 years constantly crewed without something like this happening before,” Jordan Bimm, a historian of U.S. space exploration at the University of Chicago, tells Scientific American’s Meghan Bartels. 

November 2, 2025 marked a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the ISS.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

View Original Article