Crew returned to Earth earlier

Why NASA astronauts just splashed down off San Diego

The crew returned to Earth earlier than expected.

By Anna FitzGerald Guth

Four astronauts in a SpaceX spacecraft streaked across California’s clear skies last night, returning to Earth after 167 days in space.

The mission Crew-11 returned from the International Space Station about a month earlier than planned due to an undisclosed medical concern for a crew member. In the 25-year history of the station, this marks the first time anyone has left for a medical reason.

“This is a first,” Abhishek Tripathi, the director of mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and a former Dragon mission director at SpaceX, told SFGATE. “To my knowledge, no NASA mission has ever been cut short because of a medical evacuation.”

On social media, users posted pictures and video of the capsule jetting above the San Francisco sky in the early morning hours.

Four minutes before reaching the Pacific Ocean, the astronauts began to deploy sets of parachutes to slow their speed of about 350 mph. At 12:41 a.m. Pacific time, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down off the coast of San Diego.

A SpaceX ship recovered the spacecraft from the ocean and at around 1:30 a.m. and welcomed aboard NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, plus Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

NASA did not disclose which astronaut is ill.

“This mission brought Crew 11 safely home, [and the astronauts] are all safe and in good spirits,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference early Thursday morning. “All crew members are currently undergoing the routine post splashdown medical evaluation. The crew member of concern is doing fine. We will share updates on their health as soon as it’s appropriate to do so.”

If the medical situation had been less stable, it would have been possible to bring the astronauts back from the space station sooner. Yet, Isaacman acknowledged, “Obviously, we took this action because it was a serious medical condition.”

The four astronauts stayed in a San Diego-area hospital overnight and are expected to leave together for Houston on Friday, according to NASA officials. 

Dragon spacecraft, both with and without crewmembers, have been recovered off the coast of California about a dozen times before, according to Tripathi. He said the original design allowed for landing in multiple locations close to the U.S. to avoid bad weather. But SpaceX has focused more on the West Coast recently, in order to decrease the risk of spacecraft debris crashing down onto land.

“[The idea was that] there’s nothing to fly over when we’re flying over the Pacific and landing off the coast of California,” Tripathi said. “[SpaceX] is giving up a little bit of flexibility, given the weather constraint, but they think that they feel more comfortable, all things considered, landing off of the coast of California.”