NASA considering bringing astronauts home early from International Space Station due to medical issue

The health issue affecting an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) may be serious enough to end his or her orbital stay early.

On Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 7), NASA announced that it has postponed a planned Thursday (Jan. 8) spacewalk outside the ISS due to an astronaut “medical concern.” The agency did not name the astronaut or share details about his or her condition, citing privacy issues, but did note that the situation is stable.

Early Thursday morning, NASA officials provided an update via email, which stressed that the crewmember remains stable. But that doesn’t mean that everything is back to normal.

“Safely conducting our missions is our highest priority, and we are actively evaluating all options, including the possibility of an earlier end to Crew-11’s mission,” the emailed update reads. “These are the situations NASA and our partners train for and prepare to execute safely. We will provide further updates within the next 24 hours.”

Crew-11 is SpaceX’s latest astronaut mission to the ISS, which consists of NASA’s Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

The planned Thursday spacewalk was to have been conducted by Cardman and Fincke.

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2, 2025 and is in the homestretch of a planned six-month orbital stay. So bringing the quartet home in the next few days, if NASA does indeed decide to do that, wouldn’t shorten the mission too dramatically.

There are three other astronauts living on the ISS at the moment as well. They are NASA’s Christopher Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, who arrived at the orbiting lab aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Nov. 27.