Four astronauts will discuss their shorter-than-expected space mission during a press conference today (Jan. 21), and you can watch the event live.
The members of SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission, the first ever to be medically evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS), will talk to reporters at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston today at 2:15 p.m. EST (1915 GMT).
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Crew-11 consisted of NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of Japan and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. The quartet arrived at the ISS in early August for a planned 6.5-month stay, but they returned to Earth on Jan. 15 — about five weeks early — due to a “medical concern” experienced by one of them in orbit.
Their departure was the first medical evacuation in the history of the ISS, which has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000.
NASA has not revealed which astronaut was affected or given us many details about the health issue, citing privacy concerns. The agency has said, however, that the crewmembers are all stable and doing fine.
According to a NASA update, all four are undergoing “standard postflight reconditioning and evaluations” in Houston, where they’ve been since Friday (Jan. 16), (Their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, splashed down off the coast of San Diego.)
Crew-11’s departure leaves the ISS staffed by just three astronauts — NASA’s Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev.
The trio will have the orbiting lab to themselves until SpaceX’s four-person Crew-12 mission arrives. Crew-12 is currently scheduled to launch on Feb. 15, but NASA and SpaceX are investigating the possibility of moving that up a few days.
Three was the nominal crew size on the ISS until 2009, when it doubled to six. The baseline number then increased again in 2020, to its current seven.