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Three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut were unexpectedly transferred to a medical facility in Florida instead of returning to their home base in Houston after landing early Friday morning aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
One of those astronauts remained hospitalized Friday afternoon with a “medical issue,” while the three others flew to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston after a health evaluation at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola, a hospital near the crew's landing site in the Gulf of Mexico .
NASA did not provide further details about the crew member who stayed at the medical facility.
“To protect the crew member's medical privacy, specific details about the crew member's condition or identity will not be shared,” according to a Friday afternoon statement from NASA news chief Cheryl Warner.
“The lone astronaut remaining in Ascension is in stable condition and under precautionary observation,” the statement said.
The four-member crew, which spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station before landing in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:29 a.m. ET on Friday, had a “safe landing and recovery,” NASA said Friday morning.
However, all four astronauts “were taken to a local medical facility for additional evaluation,” according to an update from Warner shared at 8 a.m. ET. The measure was taken for the entire crew “out of an abundance of caution,” NASA said.
The four crew members – including NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos – are the staff of Crew-8, a routine mission to the International Space Station that Space X conducted on behalf of Space X. NASA.
All four astronauts were seen smiling and waving as they left their Crew Dragon capsule and boarded a recovery ship during a livestream of their overnight landing.
Officials at NASA also gave no indication of any medical issues during a 5 a.m. ET news briefing.
“Right now the crew is doing great. They will spend some time on the recovery ship to undergo their medical checks,” Richard Jones, NASA's deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program, said at the time. “They'll be on their way to Houston soon when they're all done.”
The return of crew-8
Extensive medical checks are routine after long-term space missions. And Crew-8's stay was slightly longer than that of most astronauts traveling to the space station.
Routine trips typically last about five to seven months.
“(Crew-8 was) the longest stay in space for a U.S. manned vehicle at 235 days,” Jones said.
The Crew-8 team, which launched into space on March 4, faced repeated delays in their return home for various reasons. The roadblocks included schedule changes related to problems with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which had carried two NASA astronauts to the space station on a test flight in June but was deemed too risky to return the crew to Earth.
NASA ultimately opted to return the Boeing spacecraft empty and moved the astronauts from Starliner to the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, delaying the launch of that mission and thus the return of Crew-8.
Additional weather delays also forced the Crew-8 astronauts to return in late October.
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