“Becuase the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation,” said James “JD” Polk, NASA’s chief medical officer, in a press conference last week. “We’re not promptly disembarking and getting the astronaut down.”
Amit Kshatriya, the agency’s associate administrator, called the situation a “controlled medical evacuation” in a briefing with reporters.
But without a confirmed diagnosis of the astronaut’s medical issue, there was some “lingering risk” for the astronaut’s health if they remained in orbit, Polk said. That’s why NASA Administrator jared Isaacman and his deputies agreed to call an early end to the Crew-11 mission.
A first for NASA
The Crew-11 mission launched on August 1 and was supposed to stay on the space station until around February 20, a few days after the scheduled arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission with a team of replacement astronauts. But the early departure means the space station will operate with a crew of three until the launch of Crew-12 next month.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams will be the sole astronaut responsible for maintaining the US segment of the station. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev launched with Williams in November on a Russian Soyuz vehicle. The Crew Dragon was the lifeboat for all four Crew-11 astronauts, so standard procedure called for the entire crew to return with the astronaut suffering the undisclosed medical issue.
The space station regularly operated with just three crew members.
