NASA has made the rare move of cutting short a crewed mission to the ISS. An undisclosed medical issue with an unnamed crew member has prompted NASA to bring home SapceX’s Crew-11 in the coming days, the agency announced at a press conference on Thursday.
The decision followed news on Wednesday that NASA had called off a spacewalk, which was set to take place early on Thursday, due to “a medical situation aboard the International Space Station [involving] a single crew member who is stable.”
Jared Isaacman, the new NASA chief, said at the press conference that it was he who made the decision to bring the crew home early, describing the issue as a “serious medical condition.”
The spacewalk was set to be conducted by NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman.
Crew-11, comprising Fincke, Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russia’s Oleg Platonov, arrived in orbit in August 2025 and were due to return to Earth in late February.
While astronaut missions have sometimes lasted longer than expected, or been shortened due to technical issues, the rescheduling of Crew-11 marks the first time in NASA’s history that an astronaut mission has been cut short in such circumstances.
Speaking at Thursday’s news conference, Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, said that while ISS astronauts have access to “a very robust suite of medical hardware … we don’t have the complete amount of hardware that I would have in the emergency department, for example, to complete a workup of a patient.”
Polk added: “In this particular incident, we would like to complete that workup, and the best way to complete that workup is on the ground.”
The early departure of Crew-11 astronauts return will leave Chris Williams as the only NASA astronaut aboard the orbital outpost. Williams arrived at the ISS just over a month ago with cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev on a Russian Soyuz capsule. They’ll be joined by four more astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-12 in mid-February.