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Three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut were unexpectedly transferred to a medical facility in Florida rather than immediately returning to their home base in Houston after their splashdown early Friday morning aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
One of those astronauts stayed at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola Friday with a “medical issue,” while the three others flew to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after a health evaluation at the same hospital, which is near the crew’s splashdown site in the Gulf of Mexico. The remaining crew member was released from the medical facility and returned to Houston on Saturday, according to NASA.
The space agency did not provide any further details about the astronaut who experienced the medical issue, saying in a statement Friday only that the crew member was “in stable condition” and “under observation as a precautionary measure.”
“To protect the crew member’s medical privacy, specific details on the individual’s condition or identity will not be shared,” according to the Friday afternoon statement from NASA news chief Cheryl Warner.
The four-person crew, which spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station before landing in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:29 a.m. ET Friday, had a “safe splashdown and recovery,” NASA said Friday morning.
However, all four astronauts “were taken to a local medical facility for additional evaluation,” according to an update from Warner shared at 8 a.m. ET. The measure was taken for the entire crew “out of an abundance of caution,” according to NASA.
The four crewmates — including NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — make up the staff of Crew-8, a routine mission to the International Space Station that Space X carried out on behalf of NASA.
All four astronauts were seen smiling and waving as they exited their Crew Dragon capsule and boarded a recovery ship during a livestream of their splashdown early Friday.
Officials at NASA also did not offer any indication of medical issues during a 5 a.m. ET news briefing after landing.
“Right now the crew is doing great. They are going to spend a little bit of time on the recovery vessel going through their medical checks,” said Richard Jones, NASA’s deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program, at the time. “They’ll soon be on their way back to Houston after all of those are done.”
Crew-8’s return
Extensive medical checkouts are routine after long-duration missions to space. And Crew-8’s stay was a bit longer than most astronauts traveling to the space station.
Routinely trips typically last roughly five to seven months.
“(Crew-8 was) the longest duration in space for a US crewed vehicle at 235 days,” Jones said.
The Crew-8 team, which launched into space on March 4, faced repeated delays in their return home for a variety of reasons. Among the roadblocks were schedule changes related to issues with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which had carried two NASA astronauts to the space station on a test flight in June but was deemed too risky to return its crew back to Earth.
NASA ultimately chose to return the Boeing spacecraft home empty and moved Starliner’s astronauts onto the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, delaying that mission’s launch and thus Crew-8’s return.
Additional weather delays also pushed the Crew-8 astronauts’ return into late October.
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