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Three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut unexpectedly Instead of immediately returning to their home base in Houston, they were transferred to a medical facility in Florida Aboard the SpaceX crew Dragon capsule early Friday morning after they splashed down.
One of those astronauts remained at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola on Friday with a “medical issue,” while the other three were flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after a health evaluation at the same hospital, near the site of the crew’s splashdown in the Gulf. Mexico. The remaining crew members were released from a medical facility and returned to Houston on Saturday. According to NASA.
The space agency did not provide further details about the astronaut who experienced the medical problem, saying in a statement Friday that the crew member was “in stable condition” and “under observation as a precaution.”
“To protect the crew member’s medical privacy, specific details about the individual’s condition or identity will not be shared,” according to a statement Friday afternoon from NASA press secretary Cheryl Warner.
The four-person crew, which spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station before landing in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:29 a.m. Friday, had a “safe splashdown and recovery,” it said Friday morning.
However, an update from Warner shared at 8 a.m. ET that all four astronauts were “taken to a local medical facility for further evaluation.” According to NASA, the move was done “out of an abundance of caution” for the entire crew.
Four employees – SpaceX includes the crew of Crew-8 — a routine mission to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA — including NASA astronauts Matthew Dominique, Michael Barrett and Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
The four astronauts were seen smiling and shaking as they exited their Crew Dragon capsule and boarded a rescue ship on Splashdown live early Friday.
NASA officials gave no indication of medical complications during a 5 a.m. ET news conference after the landing.
“The crew is doing well now. They’re going to spend some time on the recovery ship going through medical tests,” said Richard Jones, NASA’s commercial crew program deputy manager at the time.
Extensive medical examinations are routine after long-duration missions to space. And Crew-8’s stay was a bit longer than most astronauts going to the space station.
Regular trips usually last between five and seven months.
“(Crew-8) was the longest time a US crewed vehicle had been in space at 235 days,” Jones said.
The Crew-8 crew, which was launched on March 4, faced repeated delays in its return home due to various reasons. Among the roadblocks were schedule changes related to problems with the Boeing Starliner shuttle, which 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 chose to return the Boeing spacecraft home empty and move the Starliner’s astronauts to the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, delaying the mission’s launch and allowing Crew-8 to return.
Additional weather delays pushed the arrival of the Crew-8 astronauts to late October.
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