It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
Totally, they put a bunch of people in those giant spinning chair things and weed out the ones that puke or freak out. Those are the astronauts, they have the right stuff.
I used to work in ISS mission control, this is not an emergency return but an early return
Also coming down on the Soyuz is pretty routine and only takes a few hours- I’d say it was overall a far less risky situation than being in Antarctic on a deep ocean vessel with appendicitis etc
We have dozens and (hundreds behind them) of men and women monitoring those folks from a global network of control centers 24 hrs a day- The station is mostly commanded from the ground and plans and procedures exist for everything
- if anything its all over orchestrated and over-planned in my opinion, owing to national politics, corporate contracts and international bureaucracy
Is it risky- yes obviously-but I’d argue its less risky then being out at the south pole in winter
Astronauts are of a breed apart. They're strapped onto a literally bomb which launches them into a vacuum, and windows where there is no chance of a mission abort. They've pretty much accepted a risk of death that most would simply not tolerate. Ex-military is common for astronauts for a reason.
Not that it really changes the point but modern spacecraft do have an option to abort (begin returning to earth) at just about any time. There's still contingencies where that won't save you of course.
Everyone on the ISS needs to have a seat reserved for them in a docked spacecraft, in case they need to evacuate the station quickly (or for a medical issue like this). You can’t bring back just one person from a 4-person crew; the other 3 would have no way to leave.
Well, yes? The medical issue is apparently severe enough to warrant return. Because the crew dragon is the only way for those astronauts back, barring sending another one up shortly, they also have to come back.
The reason they are bringing the whole crew back is most likely cost related. The whole crew was due back in February anyway. They are bringing everyone home a bit early; otherwise they would need another flight a few weeks later.
And nobody is retreating: there will be 1 American and 2 Russians left on ISS. All of this from the article.
Bruh, you're talking about one of the most protocol laden risk averse organizations known to man. That's an absurd speculation compared to the thing you would naively expect, which is exactly what is happening.
The ISS is a good example of a fully isolated environment. No new bacteria or viruses arrive there apart from spacecraft arrivals.
I've been curious for a while what human health would look like if there was a small group of people isolated for many decades. Would they effectively be disease free after the first few weeks?
As well as removing flu and colds, might it also reduce things like heart disease and Alzheimer's which we have weak evidence are linked to transmissible diseases?
The downside to doing that is that their immune system would be weak in the end. We survive cold and flu because we have had them before, but someone going many years without the yearly viruses would get hit 100x harder, even potentially dying.
This describes NASA's pre-flight quarantines since Apollo 14, and makes (very brief) references to in-flight diseases (and apparent transmission) prior to Apollo 14 ("upper respiratory infection"; "viral gastroenteritis"),
Technically there has only been one fatal accident in space, the Soyuz 11 failure which killed the crew of three. That occurred above the Karman line, all other spaceflight related fatalities were at much lower altitudes or on the ground.
> certain groups of online warriors are convinced she is the one who is sick because of the "women are weak and can't do man work" trope.
Care to point to anything specific that leads you to believe this?
> So keep that in mind when people are demanding transparency.
Why should the (possible?) existence of online groups have any bearing on public policy like this? Probably for many policy decisions, we can find some online group that would spin it a certain way in their minds. That doesn't mean we let it influence our decisions one way or the other. Or to be precise, not any more than what the proportion of the voting population they make up would imply.
This is the first time I hear that. On HN, no less.
Your post seems to be kinda fighting against it, but what it does is actually creates the narrative it seems to be fighting against. Otherwise I'd never hear it.
How are they explaining away the fact that the Japanese male astronaut asked for a consult with the flight surgeon on the public loop (a video which NASA has since removed from YouTube)?
I remember reading about all of the foibles of Apollo 7 and how that was caused by the astronauts all getting a head cold and being miserable and irritable, or how Frank Borman got so space sick on Apollo 8 he recorded a secret message in the data dump for the doctor to bypass the capcom, and I’m curious how this now became a pseudo-political issue.
Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency. You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy. We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
> Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
What difference would this make to you? It would unnecessarily violate someone’s medical privacy for no actual benefit to the public other than satisfying someone’s curiosity.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
Yes, everyone gets privacy. You don’t get to see their private communications back home. You don’t get their medical records.
They aren’t receiving money from taxpayers like a gift. They’re doing a job. It’s ridiculous to demand that they forfeit their privacy because tax money was involved.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
NASA will learn what went wrong here because they’re in a position to act on
You are not in a position to do anything about it. Violating their privacy would make no difference.
Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide),
Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
These are free people (who happen to have a job that involves a space program). They have the same rights to [try to] keep their medical concerns private as you and I do.
It does cost a lot of money to keep their jobs going, but: They're not slaves. We do not own these people.
The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.
Especially since every movement up and down from space is expensive and risks the life of the crew, it'd be a bad idea for NASA to name the astronaut ahead of time.
Disagree; this is completely taxpayer funded and we deserve to know every detail relevant to mission status. In this scenario knowing what illness and why it's grounds for a return is very relevant. That said, I can see NASA delaying information release to figure out a good strategy for it while still respecting any wishes of the sick astronaut with regards to disclosure.
Yes, but at the same time I think NASA has long earned the trust to decide these things. Regardless of the issue, nobody wants their health issues aired to the entire world. I am personally okay just not knowing the intimate details.
What possible use is it to the taxpayer to know who was affected by what health condition? NASA knows who the person is, if there is any lesson to be learned this policy isn't stopping them. What lesson do you, random citizen, expect to learn? What would you do differently if you had access to this information?
If it is policy to overshare medical details, that might lead astronauts to delay or refuse to give medical information that does matter to the mission. Before we talk at all of medical ethics, on purely pragmatic grounds this information ought to be confidential.
I think it’s possible to be sufficiently transparent while simultaneously keeping someone’s personal health status private.
As a hypothetical example, it’s possible to disclose if this health issue was known before they were selected for the mission, and if it was, what processes were in place to determine if they should or should not go, etc, all without revealing personal health information.
When I say I want full transparency, I usually am talking about how much pay they received and in the case of elected representatives, their net worth at least once a year.
I wouldn't ask for a full health report to be made public by law. Maybe a summary for elected officials.
Why do you need to know how much they are paid and their net worth? What difference does it make to you? Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well.
Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
I'm sure NASA is keeping good records and will take lessons learned from this situation, but they can do that without blasting someone's private medical information out publicly.
The only medical condition I can think of which they would not disclose is pregnancy. That would lead to further questions and is controversial despite being very simple. Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
> Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
Nope. On a previous mission one of the crew members had to sped a night in hospital after touchdown. They never said who, or what for. This is standard procedure, and for good reason.
It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
How could you keep calm so far away
By going through a ten-year process that selects for calm people.
I can’t imagine any other group who would be as calm as NASA astronauts. Maybe SEALs or other special forces.
It looks like there are a few astronauts that were SEALs, one returned December 9th from the ISS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Kim
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Somewhat related to this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zo62S0ulqhA
Totally, they put a bunch of people in those giant spinning chair things and weed out the ones that puke or freak out. Those are the astronauts, they have the right stuff.
I used to work in ISS mission control, this is not an emergency return but an early return
Also coming down on the Soyuz is pretty routine and only takes a few hours- I’d say it was overall a far less risky situation than being in Antarctic on a deep ocean vessel with appendicitis etc
We have dozens and (hundreds behind them) of men and women monitoring those folks from a global network of control centers 24 hrs a day- The station is mostly commanded from the ground and plans and procedures exist for everything
- if anything its all over orchestrated and over-planned in my opinion, owing to national politics, corporate contracts and international bureaucracy
Is it risky- yes obviously-but I’d argue its less risky then being out at the south pole in winter
See: https://nasawatch.com/iss-news/crew-medical-telecon-summary/
Then why did you mention Soyuz when Dragon is coming down early?
or on the way to Mars.
Astronauts are of a breed apart. They're strapped onto a literally bomb which launches them into a vacuum, and windows where there is no chance of a mission abort. They've pretty much accepted a risk of death that most would simply not tolerate. Ex-military is common for astronauts for a reason.
Not that it really changes the point but modern spacecraft do have an option to abort (begin returning to earth) at just about any time. There's still contingencies where that won't save you of course.
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This is the reason I cringe every time I hear or read statements like “we went to the moon”, “we’ve split the atom”, “we developed antibiotics”, …
No, we didn’t. A few who are not like us did.
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Going on a spaceship is probably safer than driving a car.
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whatever is the cause, it is not immediate - or they would've been on the ground couple days ago
so no, not appendix
Pregnancy?
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Maybe testicular torsion triggered by zero-G conditions?
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it's only 250 miles
Maximum operating depth of a Nuclear submarine is 3,350 ft.
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I think the responses to your comment speak volumes about how insular the office worker filter bubble of HN is.
There's dozens upon dozens of professions where things go wrong infinitely faster than they do in medical situations.
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Everyone on the ISS needs to have a seat reserved for them in a docked spacecraft, in case they need to evacuate the station quickly (or for a medical issue like this). You can’t bring back just one person from a 4-person crew; the other 3 would have no way to leave.
Well, yes? The medical issue is apparently severe enough to warrant return. Because the crew dragon is the only way for those astronauts back, barring sending another one up shortly, they also have to come back.
The reason they are bringing the whole crew back is most likely cost related. The whole crew was due back in February anyway. They are bringing everyone home a bit early; otherwise they would need another flight a few weeks later.
And nobody is retreating: there will be 1 American and 2 Russians left on ISS. All of this from the article.
It's not that the entire crew is compromised medically, it's that logistically if one goes home they all have to.
Bruh, you're talking about one of the most protocol laden risk averse organizations known to man. That's an absurd speculation compared to the thing you would naively expect, which is exactly what is happening.
This mission doesn't matter to any normal human in any relevant way that NASA would need to hide anything.
I'm completely lost on your way of thinking
Why the conspiracy theory?
Did NASA say when they're coming back? The article didn't mention it.
Should also mention NASA is trying to move up the launch of Crew 12 to cover some of the gap.
Current schedule is departure Wednesday, splashdown Thursday morning: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/commercialcrew/2026/01/09/nasa-sp...
Reentry should be visible from large parts of the west coast (if they stick to this schedule).
Thanks!
All I know is that SpaceX said dragon and crew-11 would undock no earlier than Wednesday, Jan 14.
>NASA has said it will announce a target return date in the coming days.
Article about how the return capsule works: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52840482
The ISS is a good example of a fully isolated environment. No new bacteria or viruses arrive there apart from spacecraft arrivals.
I've been curious for a while what human health would look like if there was a small group of people isolated for many decades. Would they effectively be disease free after the first few weeks?
As well as removing flu and colds, might it also reduce things like heart disease and Alzheimer's which we have weak evidence are linked to transmissible diseases?
The downside to doing that is that their immune system would be weak in the end. We survive cold and flu because we have had them before, but someone going many years without the yearly viruses would get hit 100x harder, even potentially dying.
Related question. Have transmittable diseases spread in space? What examples do we know of?
There have been a few instances, IIRC there was an Apollo mission that had a head cold spread among the whole crew.
But that's unlikely to be the case here because they've been up there isolated for over 6 months now
> IIRC there was an Apollo mission that had a head cold spread among the whole crew.
Yep, Apollo 7.
Would it be possible for some food to have been contaminated with something? It seems unlikely.
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This describes NASA's pre-flight quarantines since Apollo 14, and makes (very brief) references to in-flight diseases (and apparent transmission) prior to Apollo 14 ("upper respiratory infection"; "viral gastroenteritis"),
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ochmo-tb-006... ("Health Stabilization Program (HSP)")
AFAIK no one have died in space from medical issues yet. Only accidents.
Technically there has only been one fatal accident in space, the Soyuz 11 failure which killed the crew of three. That occurred above the Karman line, all other spaceflight related fatalities were at much lower altitudes or on the ground.
The other one that comes close is Columbia which broke up at around 60 km.
There was one cosmonaut who died shortly after emergency return to the Earth. I think it was in the 90s, but maybe eariler.
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> certain groups of online warriors are convinced she is the one who is sick because of the "women are weak and can't do man work" trope.
Care to point to anything specific that leads you to believe this?
> So keep that in mind when people are demanding transparency.
Why should the (possible?) existence of online groups have any bearing on public policy like this? Probably for many policy decisions, we can find some online group that would spin it a certain way in their minds. That doesn't mean we let it influence our decisions one way or the other. Or to be precise, not any more than what the proportion of the voting population they make up would imply.
This is the first time I hear that. On HN, no less.
Your post seems to be kinda fighting against it, but what it does is actually creates the narrative it seems to be fighting against. Otherwise I'd never hear it.
How are they explaining away the fact that the Japanese male astronaut asked for a consult with the flight surgeon on the public loop (a video which NASA has since removed from YouTube)?
There's no basis to such claims in the first place and they don't engage with substantive discussion. It's just more flooding of the zone.
I remember reading about all of the foibles of Apollo 7 and how that was caused by the astronauts all getting a head cold and being miserable and irritable, or how Frank Borman got so space sick on Apollo 8 he recorded a secret message in the data dump for the doctor to bypass the capcom, and I’m curious how this now became a pseudo-political issue.
Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency. You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy. We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
> Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
I remember watching a landing and the camera cut away when one of the returning astronauts got sick.
These are human beings and employees not Big Brother contestants.
The full on dystopian take would be to require anyone receiving welfare or other public funds to fully disclose all of their private details.
You want Medicaid? Tell everyone about your hemorrhoids first.
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What difference would this make to you? It would unnecessarily violate someone’s medical privacy for no actual benefit to the public other than satisfying someone’s curiosity.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
Yes, everyone gets privacy. You don’t get to see their private communications back home. You don’t get their medical records.
They aren’t receiving money from taxpayers like a gift. They’re doing a job. It’s ridiculous to demand that they forfeit their privacy because tax money was involved.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
NASA will learn what went wrong here because they’re in a position to act on
You are not in a position to do anything about it. Violating their privacy would make no difference.
Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide),
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770023791 ("The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: Medical report" (1977))
Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
These are free people (who happen to have a job that involves a space program). They have the same rights to [try to] keep their medical concerns private as you and I do.
It does cost a lot of money to keep their jobs going, but: They're not slaves. We do not own these people.
The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.
Especially since every movement up and down from space is expensive and risks the life of the crew, it'd be a bad idea for NASA to name the astronaut ahead of time.
Disagree; this is completely taxpayer funded and we deserve to know every detail relevant to mission status. In this scenario knowing what illness and why it's grounds for a return is very relevant. That said, I can see NASA delaying information release to figure out a good strategy for it while still respecting any wishes of the sick astronaut with regards to disclosure.
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Yes, but at the same time I think NASA has long earned the trust to decide these things. Regardless of the issue, nobody wants their health issues aired to the entire world. I am personally okay just not knowing the intimate details.
Demanding every intimate personal detail of a human whose paycheck you happen to underwrite feels a little ... inhumane.
What possible use is it to the taxpayer to know who was affected by what health condition? NASA knows who the person is, if there is any lesson to be learned this policy isn't stopping them. What lesson do you, random citizen, expect to learn? What would you do differently if you had access to this information?
If it is policy to overshare medical details, that might lead astronauts to delay or refuse to give medical information that does matter to the mission. Before we talk at all of medical ethics, on purely pragmatic grounds this information ought to be confidential.
Perhaps you should chill and wait until they land before you start with your ridiculous paranoid thinking and entitlement?
People in general expect privacy when it comes to medical issues.
I think it’s possible to be sufficiently transparent while simultaneously keeping someone’s personal health status private.
As a hypothetical example, it’s possible to disclose if this health issue was known before they were selected for the mission, and if it was, what processes were in place to determine if they should or should not go, etc, all without revealing personal health information.
When I say I want full transparency, I usually am talking about how much pay they received and in the case of elected representatives, their net worth at least once a year.
I wouldn't ask for a full health report to be made public by law. Maybe a summary for elected officials.
Why do you need to know how much they are paid and their net worth? What difference does it make to you? Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well.
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Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?
May be it would be better to have a full diagnosis after splashdown?
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
I'm sure NASA is keeping good records and will take lessons learned from this situation, but they can do that without blasting someone's private medical information out publicly.
I don't think taxes being used can justify a breach of medical confidentiality
You know that golden ballroom Trump has been constructing with your tax dollars isn’t going to be for the public either…
The only medical condition I can think of which they would not disclose is pregnancy. That would lead to further questions and is controversial despite being very simple. Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
That alone is enough reason to have a policy of never disclosing medical conditions.
> Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
Nope. On a previous mission one of the crew members had to sped a night in hospital after touchdown. They never said who, or what for. This is standard procedure, and for good reason.
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