We now know when the first medical evacuation in the history of the International Space Station will take place.
Friday evening (January 9), NASA announced that he is targeting Wednesday, January 14, the earlier-than-expected departure of SpaceX’s four-person spacecraft. Crew-11 mission from the orbiting laboratory.
Crew 11 consists of NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japanese space pilot Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency. Roscosmos. The quartet arrived at the ISS on August 2 for a stay of about six months, but they will end up falling a little short of that goal.
On Wednesday, January 7, NASA announced that it was postponing a spacewalk on Thursday, January 8 that was to be carried out by Fincke and Cardman because an ISS astronaut had experienced a “medical concern“.
On Thursday, the agency announced that it bring Crew-11 astronauts home soonerto better diagnose and treat this medical problem. NASA wouldn’t tell us which astronaut was affected or what exactly the problem was, citing privacy concerns.
Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, however, gave a vague description during a news conference Thursday.
“This is not an operational issue. This is not an injury that occurred during continued operations,” Polk said. “It is mainly a medical problem in difficult areas of microgravityand with the hardware suite we have available to carry out a diagnosis.”
On Thursday, NASA officials said they would soon set a departure date for Crew 11, and that information did indeed arrive quickly – Friday evening.
The Crew-11 astronauts were supposed to stay aboard the ISS until their replacements, SpaceX’s four spaceplanes, arrived. Crew-12 assignment. Liftoff for Crew-12 is currently scheduled for mid-February, although NASA plans to move it up a bit if possible.
After Crew 11 departs, only three astronauts will remain aboard the orbiting laboratory: NASA’s Christopher Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, all of whom traveled to the ISS. November 27 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
It’s definitely a skeleton crewbecause the current nominal crew size of the ISS is seven people. But this is far from unprecedented; three was the base crew size for the station until 2009, when it was doubled to six. (The current benchmark is seven.)
The ISS has been continuously staffed with rotating crews of astronauts since November 2000. It’s a bit surprising that it took a quarter of a century to see the first medical evacuation from the orbiting laboratory: Statistical models suggest that such events should recur at intervals of about three years, according to Polk.
