Updated January 8, 2026 at 6:29 PM EST
NASA is cutting short a mission at the International Space Station due to a medical issue with a crew member. The agency is planning to return all four members of the Crew-11 mission more than a month early. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the crew would return to Earth "in the coming days."
NASA did not disclose the name of the crewmember or the ailment, citing health privacy. Isaacman described it as a "serious medical condition."
NASA first acknowledged what it called a "medical concern" Wednesday, when the agency announced the cancellation of a planned spacewalk Thursday. Two NASA astronauts, Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, were supposed to venture outside the orbiting lab and update the station's power system. The additional power from new solar panels would help safely deorbit the station upon its retirement in 2030.
The two NASA astronauts, along with a Japanese Space Station astronaut and Russian Space Agency Cosmonaut, are members of NASA's Crew-11 mission which launched to the space station from Florida's Kennedy Space Center August 1, 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
Typically, station crews spend about six to eight months living and working on the station. The next crew rotation isn't scheduled to launch until next month.
The decision to cut the mission short due to health reasons is a first for NASA in 65 years of human spaceflight, according to Robert Pearlman, editor of the space history news website collectSpace.com.
"Though it has always been a contingency the agency has considered, NASA has never had to cut short a mission before due to an astronaut falling ill," he said. "Crew members have had medical problems in space, but they never rose so high as to come home early."
The decision to bring all four members of the crew back was made by leadership across NASA and with input from the crew's flight surgeons. NASA said it prioritized the call with the crewmember's safety first and foremost in mind.
Paul Dye, a former flight controller who worked on the space shuttle and International Space Station missions, said that's how teams approach any problems when it comes to the health and safety of the crew.
"In flight, you do what is necessary for the safety of the crew and then the success of the mission," he said. "Safety of the crew comes first, and if the only answer is to bring them home, then you bring them home."
While Dye and NASA flight controllers have never had to perform a medical evacuation of a crew, he said the team trains for that very possibility.
"It's actually fairly unremarkable from a standpoint of muscle memory, if you will, or mental muscle memory," said Dye "because we just work that kind of stuff all the time in training."
Once they depart, there will only be three people on the International Space Station, which will affect the station's operations. The three include the two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut from an earlier Soyuz mission. A new SpaceX crew isn't slated to launch until February to help keep the massive orbiting lab running.
"It's a significant problem," said Don Platt, a professor at Florida Tech and former International Space Station engineer. "That means, basically the crew members that are there are pretty much just concentrating on making sure the space station can continue to run, do any maintenance requirements that they may have. A lot of the science will have to be postponed."
The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by humans since 2000. The fact that there hasn't been a major medical incident is in part due to the training astronauts and cosmonauts receive before launching to the ISS.
"We actually get quite a bit of training across all of the equipment that's available for the whole crew," said retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, who spent more than three months living and working on the station. "The primary interest is being able to respond to somebody who might be in an emergency situation, of course."
That includes first aid equipment specially designed to provide medical aid in the microgravity environment of space, suture equipment, a suite of pharmaceutical treatments, even equipment to perform dental procedures.
"With the support of our ground team, our flight surgeons and the people on the ground that we can communicate with really well, we can do a lot of guided assisted procedures up there," Scott said. "We're very well stocked and supported that way."
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