NASA will evacuate space station after medical issue

Update, Jan. 9:

NASA said on Thursday it would cut short a mission to the International Space Station and return a four-member crew to Earth early due to an unspecified medical concern with one of the astronauts. Agency officials said the situation was not a medical emergency but that they had decided to end the mission early out of an abundance of caution. It is NASA’s first medical evacuation from the ISS. Three other astronauts are currently living at the orbiting space station and are scheduled to remain until summer.

Original story:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Thursday said it scrubbed a planned spacewalk due to an unspecified medical concern with a member of the International Space Station’s crew. The crew member was in stable condition on Thursday. NASA was considering evacuating the crew from the station and ending their mission early, it said in a statement.

Crew-11 includes two Americans, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, as well as Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia. It was unclear which crew member experienced the unspecified medical issue.

What did the astronauts plan to do during the canceled Thursday spacewalk? Cardman and Fincke previously planned to install a power channel for a future installation of solar power arrays. The arrays would provide additional power for the space station’s operations, including its planned de-orbit in 2030, NASA said ahead of the canceled spacewalk. The scrubbed spacewalk would have been the astronauts’ first of 2026. It was unclear whether another walk scheduled for Jan. 15 would go forward as planned.

Dig deeper: Listen to Emma Eicher’s story on how a Christmas Eve reading from the moon became part of astronaut James Lovell’s legacy.

—This Sift has been corrected to reflect that the date of a second planned NASA spacewalk is Jan. 15.