Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.
Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California. This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.
What We Know (And Don’t)
To respect the privacy of the individual involved, NASA has been very careful not to identify which member of the multi-nation Crew-11 mission is ill. All of the communications from the space agency have used vague language when discussing the specifics of the situation, and unless something gets leaked to the press, there’s an excellent chance that we’ll never really know what happened on the Station. But we can at least piece some of the facts together.
On January 7th, Kimiya Yui of Japan was heard over the Station’s live audio feed requesting a private medical conference (PMC) with flight surgeons before the conversation switched over to a secure channel. At the time this was not considered particularly interesting, as PMCs are not uncommon and in the past have never involved anything serious. Life aboard the Station means documenting everything, so a PMC could be called to report a routine ailment that we wouldn’t give a second thought to here on Earth.
But when NASA later announced that the extravehicular activity (EVA) scheduled for the next day was being postponed due to a “medical concern”, the press started taking notice. Unlike what we see in the movies, conducting an EVA is a bit more complex than just opening a hatch. There are many hours of preparation, tests, and strenuous work before astronauts actually leave the confines of the Station, so the idea that a previously undetected medical issue could come to light during this process makes sense. That said, Kimiya Yui was not scheduled to take part in the EVA, which was part of a long-term project of upgrading the Station’s aging solar arrays. Adding to the mystery, a representative for Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) told Kyodo News that Yui “has no health issues.”
This has lead to speculation from armchair mission controllers that Yui could have requested to speak to the flight surgeons on behalf of one of the crew members that was preparing for the EVA — namely station commander Mike Fincke and flight engineer Zena Cardman — who may have been unable or unwilling to do so themselves.
Within 24 hours of postponing the EVA, NASA held a press conference and announced Crew-11 would be coming home ahead of schedule as teams “monitor a medical concern with a crew member”. The timing here is particularly noteworthy; the fact that such a monumental decision was made so quickly would seem to indicate the issue was serious, and yet the crew ultimately didn’t return to Earth for another week.
Work Left Unfinished
While the reusable rockets and spacecraft of SpaceX have made crew changes on the ISS faster and cheaper than they were during the Shuttle era, we’re still not at the point where NASA can simply hail a Dragon like they’re calling for an orbital taxi. Sending up a new vehicle to pickup the ailing astronaut, while not impossible, would have been expensive and disruptive as one of the Dragon capsules in rotation would have had to be pulled from whatever mission it was assigned to.
So unfortunately, bringing one crew member home means everyone who rode up to the Station with them needs to leave as well. Given that each astronaut has a full schedule of experiments and maintenance tasks they are to work on while in orbit, one of them being out of commission represents a considerable hit to the Station’s operations. Losing all four of them at once is a big deal.
Granted, not everything the astronauts were scheduled to do is that critical. Tasks range form literal grade-school science projects performed as public outreach to long-term medical evaluations — some of the unfinished work will be important enough to get reassigned to another astronaut, while some tasks will likely be dropped altogether.
But the EVA that Crew-11 didn’t complete represents a fairly serious issue. The astronauts were set to do preparatory work on the outside of the Station to support the installation of upgraded roll-out solar panels during an EVA scheduled for the incoming Crew-12 to complete later on this year. It’s currently unclear if Crew-12 received the necessary training to complete this work, but even if they have, mission planners will now have to fit an unforeseen extra EVA into what’s already a packed schedule.
What Could Have Been
Having to bring the entirety of Crew-11 back because of what would appear to be a non-life-threatening medical situation with one individual not only represents a considerable logistical and monetary loss to the overall ISS program in the immediate sense, but will trigger a domino effect that delays future work. It was a difficult decision to make, but what if it didn’t have to be that way?
In other timeline, the ISS would have featured a dedicated “lifeboat” known as the Crew Return Vehicle (CRV). A sick or injured crew member could use the CRV to return to Earth, leaving the spacecraft they arrived in available for the remaining crew members. Such a capability was always intended to be part of the ISS design, with initial conceptual work for the CRV dating back to the early 1990s, back when the project was still called Space Station Freedom. Indeed, the idea that the ISS has been in continuous service since 2000 without such a failsafe in place is remarkable.
Unfortunately, despite a number of proposals for a CRV, none ever made it past the prototype stage. In practice, it’s a considerable engineering challenge. A space lifeboat needs to be cheap, since if everything goes according to plan, you’ll never actually use the thing. But at the same time, it must be reliable enough that it could remain attached to the Station for years and still be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
In practice, it was much easier to simply make sure there are never more crew members on the Station than there are seats in returning spacecraft. It does mean that there’s no backup ride to Earth in the event that one of the visiting vehicles suffers some sort of failure, but as we saw during the troubled test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 in 2024, even this issue can be resolved by modifications to the crew rotation schedule.
No Such Thing as Bad Data
Everything that happens aboard the International Space Station represents an opportunity to learn something new, and this is no different. When the dust settles, you can be sure NASA will commission a report to dives into every aspect of this event and tries to determine what the agency could have done better. While the ISS itself may not be around for much longer, the information can be applied to future commercial space stations or other long-duration missions.
Was ending the Crew-11 mission the right call? Will the loses and disruptions triggered by its early termination end up being substantial enough that NASA rethinks the CRV concept for future missions? There are many questions that will need answers before it’s all said and done, and we’re eager to see what lessons NASA takes away from today.
bad take. Crew-11 came back like 6 weeks earlier than planned on their 6-month mission – that’s not a catastrophe. If NASA had developed a lifeboat CRV they would still have to ensure enough return-seats for all remaining crew so it’s not at all certain that the rest of crew 11 would be able to stay. Then the CRV needs to be refurbished and re-launched… this is not the Gotcha! Nasa Idiots! that you think it is.
“If NASA had developed a lifeboat CRV they would still have to ensure enough return-seats for all remaining crew”
If NASA had developed a lifeboat CRV they would still have to ensure enough return-seats for all remaining crew as is the situation today.
It’s not either-or.
Okay, so who of them is pregnant? ;)
(Just kidding! Another dude on the net asked this before.)
Winner! :-)
Couldn’t help but be reminded of the one-person emergency re-entry capsule, MOOSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
But I’d guess even if they had a few of these stashed on the station they still would have opted for the “everyone on the bus, we’re going home” option, if only for the reliability.
Looks like a pretty wild ride. As close to spacediving as it gets (those high-altitude balloons don’t count, they have no velocity toward the horizon)
I like the idea of something a bit less backpacky than MOOSE http://www.astronautix.com/m/moose.html but not much. A Nice hard lenticular ablative heatshield being the largest difference, automated manuvering and it can still retain the solid rocket deorbit engine, maybe an entry door rather than spacesuit vacuum entry, and some way to ensure balance. Probably smething that can be attached behind a CSM(though there are safety issues with that too) about the size of a king size bed and maybe 100kg. Replace the cold gas manuvering tanks, solid rocket, and probably oxygen candle and CO2 scrubber every few years. Really these should be hanging all over the space station like individual lifeboats, open emergency hatch, enter, close door(seals space station, maybe even epoxys the hatch shut), fire detach squibs or gas, system determines orientation, manuvers, waits to be over friendly territory if desired, fires deorbit rocket, re-enter, deploys parachute and activates EPIRB. You could upgrade the thing for non-worst-case scenarios like our sick astronaut and maybe a nicer parasail vs conical most reliable parachutes. There is a case to be made for including a Fulton Skyhook system to avoid dangerous landing though that involves reviving substantial rescue aircraft infrastructure.
IMHO, with all the negative (mass-media) flak regularly hurled at NASA, I admire their ability to make do with the bare minimum engineers (as opposed to administrators that are more than plenty) and still deliver amazing results.
As far as NASA budget review goes, they are one of the lowest-paid entities comparably-speaking delivering outstanding results (speaking of the computer I am writing this reply on – we HAVE to thank NASA for that). We have more than plenty government agencies existing for no particular purpose other than, and I actually find it amazing that they are still delivering results they were asked to deliver.
I agree with your general sentiment that NASA is pretty cheap and a good return on investment, but NASA hasn’t contributed significantly to the development of computers.
Why isn’t the emergency return just an extra dragon capsule (or whatever they’re using at each point in time)? They’re proved to be reliable, and just having one extra docked would mean they’d have a spare. And rather than leave it unused for 20 years and hope it works, when people leave they just always ride the oldest one down, so all it means is each capsule is docked for a bit longer than currently.
I would guess that’s because the only “extra” dragon capsules they have would be configured for cargo. I have the idea that when a crew comes up, they leave on that same capsule…so to get an extra one, we’d have to send one without a crew. Which they do, but they don’t install seats in that one so it comes home empty / filled with garbage. I have no idea what it’d take to convert a cargo capsule to a crewed one in orbit.
Hm. That’s a good point, though I’m not sure if I’d trust a fancy, overengineered, macho SpaceY capsule over an USSR era Sojut capsule.
I somehow have more faith in them “rust buckets” than US products, which are more “show” than substance.
The Soyuz/Sojus were primitive, sure, but rock-solid.
Comparable to old Apollo capsules, but they stood the test of time.
Same goes for Progress freigthers, I guess, which are about as old.
Decay and damage from micro meteroites are another critical point, though.
I don’t know how these emergency capsules are “stored”.
If they are kept pressurized or not, for example.
Without oxygen, the absence of corrosion might not have aged an capsule so much.
I forgot to explain: What makes me think that way is the first showcase of such a modern US capsule that I saw.
It had lots of big TFT touch screens with sci-fi graphics just for “show”.
See “Figure 10” on this site, for example: https://tinyurl.com/mwtwtte
Because I think that in a real emergency, “real”, physical controls are a life saver.
Something you can feel through the gloves of a spacesuit, something less “digital”.
Just like with the old capsules. Sure, somemight say that the new ones might have a traditional backup system, too,
but how much control does it provide?
Is it as reliable orflexible as the real thing? I’m sceptical.
Spend a not so small fortune supporting the station and then something ?reasonably critical? requiring evac and we have not a clue what is actually going on.
Sigh, still money well spent….
I’m actually a little irritated at the whole “concern for medical privacy” thing. IIRC we’ve seen this a few times before, and it’s always struck me as being misplaced.
I get that astronauts are individual human beings and as such are entitled to have their personal secrets. If I were an astronaut I would want it this way.
Yet they are also government employees, on a government mission, operating a government vessel, one that invests literally billions of dollars of public money on their individual status at any time.
At some point, the people paying for this – again, to the tune of literally billions of dollars – have a right to know what’s going on.
Does Bob your neighbor have an unfortunate malady that’s threatening his job performance? Here on Earth that’s none of your damn business.
Does Bob the government employee entrusted with billions of dollars of public equipment in an extremely unforgiving environment where literal lives are at stake all day long have an unfortunate malady that’s threatening his job performance?
That’s a question that more people than just Bob have a stake in.
The performance of these human factors matters to us, and that’s why we pay for multiple teams of experts on earth that are doing things like training, monitoring, treating, and even redesigning systems around discovered human frailty. We would be throwing away our money if we didn’t have the staff to supervise and maintain and improve our orbiting human resources.
But as to whether the juicy gossip ever gets back to us here…how does that matter? Not everyone at NASA is a saint but a lot of their staff is honestly interested in the mission and if there’s some sort of problem they’re running into that’s causing them problems, they will try to figure out how to control for that with their processes whether I’m there watching them or not. If citizen backseat driving was really essential to NASA’s success then they couldn’t stand a chance at the kind of missions they’ve been (mostly) successfully completing.
I do hope that if there’s a general lesson to learn, it will be published in some impersonalized / round-about way.
How do you figure anyone but their family and maybe their immediate actual employer has a “stake” in whether someone has cancer, heart disease, mental health issues or whatever? Yah, you’re the taxpayer. That doesn’t mean you own their privacy.