NASA Remains Stubbornly Silent on Why Crew Went to Hospital After Dragon Splashdown

The press conference held earlier today was NASA’s chance to explain why the four astronauts of Crew-8 were sent to the hospital after splashing on Earth on October 25, but the agency and its astronauts quickly shut down any attempts by journalists to gather more information. .

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission has returned to Earth after spending eight months aboard the International Space Station (ISS). When they returned home, all four astronauts were hospitalized and one was forced to stay overnight due to an unknown health problem.

“Flying in space is still something we don’t fully understand, we find things we don’t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we are still putting things together this time to maintain medical confidentiality and allow our procedures to move forward in an orderly manner, this is all we will say about that event at this time. ,” NASA astronaut Michael Barratt told reporters on Friday. “That leaves us with 235 days, three hours and 35 minutes of Crew-8 experience open to your questions.”

Naturally, the first question from the room was, why? “I didn’t say I’m not comfortable talking about it, I said we won’t talk about it,” emphasized Barratt, who is also a doctor. “Space medicine is something I’m very passionate about … and the way we deal with human spaceflight is something we all take very seriously.” The astronaut added that eventually, NASA will allow this information to be documented and released, but medical privacy and due process are two of the space agency’s top priorities right now.

Crew-8 includes NASA astronauts Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin (who did not participate in the news conference due to his travel schedule). Four astronauts launched the ISS on March 4, and spent 232 days aboard the ISS, traveling nearly 100 million kilometers and completing 3,760 orbits of Earth, according to NASA.

The crew is spread out on the Florida coast, aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Although the crew capsule entered normally, all four astronauts were flown to a hospital in Florida for postflight evaluations “out of an abundance of caution,” NASA wrote at the time.

Three crew members left the hospital and one unnamed astronaut stayed to sleep, possibly due to a health problem. The identity and status of the astronauts are not shared by NASA to protect their privacy. The astronaut was released the next day and was in “good health,” according to the space agency.

Shortly after the incident, a member of NASA’s safety panel urged SpaceX to focus on crew safety during commercial missions to the ISS. “Both NASA and SpaceX need to focus on the safe operation of Crew Dragon and not take any ‘normal’ tasks,” said Kent Rominger, former astronaut and member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, during the interview.

Another possible explanation for Rominger’s statement is that the safety of the crew may have been compromised during their return from the Dragon spacecraft or because of its splash in the ocean. However, it is not clear if this was the case, or if the crew experienced any medical problems during their stay on the ISS. It’s also possible that Rominger was referring to some unusual Crew Dragon flights this year. Nevertheless, SpaceX is now under the security microscope.

In February 2022, the Dragon cargo spacecraft experienced a problem on its return to Earth, with the delayed opening of one of its parachutes. It was the second time one of the Dragon’s parachutes failed to open in time, a similar issue occurred during the Crew-2 mission. No such issue was reported during Crew-8’s re-entry, NASA said.

The astronauts’ return to Earth was repeatedly delayed for several weeks due to Hurricane Milton, which forced the space agency to abandon the relaunch attempt on October 7. That is more than the mission was extended from the usual six-month rotation of the crew on the ISS to approx. eight months in space. The crew was originally scheduled to return in mid-August but NASA extended the mission to keep the Dragon spacecraft stationary at the ISS for the extended Starliner astronauts in case of an emergency.

Although humans have spent a long time in space, two Russian astronauts recently broke the record for the longest stay on the ISS by spending 374 consecutive days aboard the space station. Much is still unknown about the effects of spaceflight on the human body as only a select few have experienced being in microgravity for months at a time. As NASA and other space agencies aim to launch long-duration crews to the Moon, and perhaps Mars one day, there is much more research to be done on how human bodies begin to degrade in weightlessness.

As Crew-8 astronaut Dominick’s first time aboard the ISS showed, humans experience space differently. “Big things you expect, right? Confusion, and dizziness,” said Dominick, who conducted research on the ISS board by sitting on a bicycle seat, on Friday. “But the little things, like sitting on a hard chair…it doesn’t bother me and I didn’t expect that, did I? It wasn’t in the book that I read, like, ‘hey, you’re going to go into space. It’s going to be hard to sit on a hard chair.’”

Well, now we know.