NASA has taken the rare step of canceling a manned mission to the ISS. An undisclosed medical issue involving an unnamed crew member has prompted NASA to bring SapceX’s Crew-11 home in the coming days, the agency announced at a news conference Thursday.
The decision followed Wednesday’s news that NASA had canceled a spacewalk scheduled to take place early Thursday due to “a medical situation aboard the International Space Station involving a single crew member who is stable.”
Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new chief, said at the news conference that he made the decision to bring the crew home early, describing the problem as a “serious medical condition.”
The spacewalk was to be carried out by NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman.
Crew-11, consisting of Fincke, Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov, reached orbit in August 2025 and was scheduled to return to Earth at the end of February.
While astronaut missions have sometimes taken longer than expected or been shortened due to technical problems, Crew-11’s rescheduling marks the first time in NASA history that an astronaut mission has been aborted under such circumstances.
At the press conference on Thursday, Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, said that while ISS astronauts have access to “a very robust suite of medical hardware… we don’t have the full set of hardware that I would have in the emergency room to do things like examine a patient.”
Polk added, “In this particular incident, we want to complete this workup, and the best way to complete this workup is on site.”
With the Crew 11 astronauts’ early departure, Chris Williams will be the only NASA astronaut aboard the orbital outpost. Williams arrived at the ISS in a Russian Soyuz capsule a little over a month ago with cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev. Four more astronauts will join SpaceX’s Crew-12 in mid-February.
