Crew-11 Astronauts Splash Down Off San Diego After Station Medical Evacuation

Four astronauts and cosmonauts who spent about five months on the International Space Station splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego early Thursday, ending the first medical evacuation in the station’s history. The SpaceX Dragon capsule Endeavour touched down at 3:41 a.m. EST, according to NPR, after a trip of roughly 10 hours from orbit.

The crew is NASA’s Zena Cardman, the commander, and Mike Fincke, the pilot, along with Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. The capsule undocked from the station at 5:20 p.m. EST on Wednesday, when the station and capsule were about 260 miles south of Australia, NPR reported. Crew-11 launched Aug. 1, 2025, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and logged 167 days in space, 165 of them aboard the station, NPR said.

NASA announced last week that one crew member had a serious medical condition, which led it to cancel a spacewalk planned for Jan. 8 and, a day later, to bring the whole crew home. All four returned together. Agency officials have not said which astronaut was affected or what the condition is, citing medical privacy.

At a Thursday morning news conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency acted because it was “a serious medical condition,” according to Bay News 9. He said the astronaut is stable and in good spirits, and that the episode did not appear to be tied to preparations for the spacewalk. Isaacman cautioned against drawing conclusions about whether spaceflight played a role, saying the condition “could have happened on Earth,” Bay News 9 reported. He also said all four crew members had extensive medical training and that the care the astronaut received would have been the same had a doctor been aboard.

Officials stressed that the return was a planned medical evacuation, not an emergency de-orbit, which would have been faster. Joel Montalbano, a deputy associate administrator in NASA’s space operations office, said the crew would be flown from the recovery ship Shannon to a San Diego hospital for evaluation and would spend the night there, Bay News 9 reported. Once cleared, they are expected to fly to Houston to reunite with their families. Montalbano said that in a true emergency the U.S. military could reach crew members anywhere in the world.

The early departure leaves three people on the orbiting laboratory: NASA’s Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who took command from Fincke before the departure, and Sergey Mikayev, NPR and Spaceflight Now reported. Since SpaceX began operational crew flights to the station in 2020, it has typically carried seven people. NPR noted that a smaller crew means fewer experiments and less maintenance can be done.

The next rotation, SpaceX Crew-12, is scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 15 from Florida, NPR reported. Its crew is NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. Crew-11 had originally been due to stay on the station through late February to hand over to that team.

Isaacman praised the crew’s work, describing what Bay News 9 called “a near-perfect mission on orbit,” and said the event would inform how NASA selects crews in the future. He called it “incredibly premature” to say whether the affected astronaut could fly again, and said a medical professional may be included on future missions, citing a trip to Mars. NASA says it will review the evacuation and apply the lessons to later flights.

NASA first disclosed the medical concern and the early return on Jan. 8, and the affected astronaut remains unidentified.