The US space agency has declined to disclose any details about the health issue but stressed the return was not an emergency situation.<\/p>\n
Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, Nasa astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui shortly after splashdown. Photo \/ Bill Ingalls, Nasa, AFP<\/p>\n
The affected crew member \u201cis doing fine\u201d, Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters after the splashdown.<\/p>\n
Isaacman said only that the crew member experienced \u201ca serious medical condition\u201d that \u201ccould have happened on Earth completely outside of the microgravity environment\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said all crew members are safe, in good spirits and were undergoing standard post-arrival medical checks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just executed … a near-perfect mission on orbit,\u201d Isaacman said.<\/p>\n
Fincke, the SpaceX Crew-11 pilot, shared a similar message in a social media post earlier this week: \u201cFirst and foremost, we are all OK. Everyone on board is stable, safe, and well cared for.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground, where the full range of diagnostic capability exists. It\u2019s the right call, even if it\u2019s a bit bittersweet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Crew-11 quartet arrived at the ISS in early August and had been scheduled to stay onboard the space station until they were rotated out in mid-February with the arrival of the next crew.<\/p>\n
James Polk, Nasa\u2019s chief health and medical officer, previously said \u201clingering risk\u201d and a \u201clingering question as to what that diagnosis is\u201d led to the decision to bring back the crew earlier than originally scheduled.<\/p>\n
Ready for the unexpected <\/p>\n
The crew conducted a little under 900 hours of experiments during its 167 days in orbit, said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator of Nasa\u2019s Space Operations Mission Directorate.<\/p>\n
American astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who arrived at the station in November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, remained on the ISS.<\/p>\n
The Russian Roscosmos space agency operates alongside Nasa on the outpost, and the two agencies take turns transporting a citizen of the other country to and from the orbiter \u2013 one of the few areas of bilateral co-operation that still endure between the United States and Russia.<\/p>\n
Continuously inhabited since 2000, the International Space Station seeks to showcase multinational co-operation, bringing together Europe, Japan, the United States and Russia.<\/p>\n
Located some 400km above Earth, the ISS functions as a test bed for research that supports deeper space exploration \u2013 including eventual missions to return humans to the Moon and onward to Mars.<\/p>\n
The four astronauts who were evacuated had been trained to handle unexpected medical situations, said Amit Kshatriya, a senior Nasa official, praising how they have dealt with the situation.<\/p>\n
The ISS is set to be decommissioned after 2030, with its orbit gradually lowered until it breaks up in the atmosphere over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, a spacecraft graveyard.<\/p>\n
– Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US space agency has declined to disclose any details about the health issue but stressed the return…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74,24322,14900,6097,3146,1549,6440,1888,32503,19473,3011,305,1861,1019,8647,27160,3523,4754,3323,111,139,69,11599,90,43944,13572,147,23554,392,131833,139117,13655],"class_list":["post-235031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-after","tag-astronauts","tag-crew","tag-down","tag-earth","tag-evacuation","tag-ever","tag-first","tag-firstever","tag-footage","tag-four","tag-have","tag-history","tag-international","tag-iss","tag-labs","tag-medical","tag-members","tag-nasa","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-ocean","tag-on","tag-orbital","tag-pacific","tag-science","tag-showed","tag-space","tag-splash","tag-splashed","tag-station"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}