Watch SpaceX Crew-11 spacecraft blaze a fiery trail through the sky during medical evacuation from ISS (video)

Stunned Californians have shared spectacular footage of the Crew-11 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft cutting a fiery path through the night sky as four astronauts returned to Earth as part of the 1st-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station (ISS) on Jan. 15.

NASA’s Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke along with JAXA‘s Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov had their tour aboard the ISS cut short by an unspecified “medical concern” that arose on Jan. 7 and affected an undisclosed member of the Crew-11 mission.

The issue was serious enough for NASA to order the crew to return home a month early aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endeavour”, which safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 3:41 a.m. EST (0841 GMT) on Jan. 15.

Endeavour’s descent carved a spectacular glowing trail through the night sky bright enough to be seen across swathes of California. Residents looked on in awe as atmospheric friction brought on by the blistering speed of re-entry wreathed the capsule’s heat shield in glowing plasma.

Its meteor-like passage was captured in breathtaking clarity by Cindy Vejar from the city of Morgan Hill, California, who witnessed the capsule streak through the pre-dawn sky en-route to its watery landing off the coast of San Diego, as depicted in the video above. “This is my first time to see something like this and I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing. Very spectacular!,” Vejar told Space.com in an email.

Some onlookers also reported hearing sonic booms accompanying the sight of the Crew-11 spacecraft, which entered the atmosphere while travelling thousands of miles per hour before decelerating to just 120 miles per hour (193 kilometers per hour) before deploying its final set of main parachutes to slow down. “I got to see Crew-11 aboard the Dragon fly by on their re-entry back to earth,” wrote X user Mel the Honeybee after spotting the Dragon blaze through the night sky. “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen (the sonic boom hit about 5 minutes after)”

The four person crew of Endeavour were swiftly extracted from the capsule and are due to return to Houston after undergoing a post-landing medical at a San Diego hospital. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the crewmember affected by the medical concern is “doing fine” in a press conference following the successful return to Earth and that the agency would share updates on their health “as soon as it’s appropriate to do so”.