In a brief message posted to its website, NASA announced that it has postponed a planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station. They are also considering sending the entire four-person crew home months early after it was discovered that one of the astronauts involved is experiencing a medical issue.
The unnamed crewmember is described as stable, but the situation was apparently serious enough to prompt an abrupt change of plans.
The canceled spacewalk was scheduled for Thursday morning and was intended to prepare a power channel for a new solar array. Astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were going to exit the station for 6.5 hours, which would have been Cardman’s first spacewalk and Fincke’s tenth.
Instead, NASA pulled the plug less than 24 hours to go, citing medical privacy and offering few details beyond confirmation that one crew member had become unwell.
NASA Delays ISS Spacewalk Due to Astronaut’s ‘Medical Situation’
The incident is forcing mission managers to consider whether it’s safe for Crew-11 to remain in orbit or return to Earth together. Crew 11 arrived at the ISS in August 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vessel. The astronauts it dropped off include Fincke, Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
Their mission was originally scheduled to end in late February upon the arrival of the next crew in the rotation, Crew-12.
NASA trains extensively for medical contingencies and has protocols in place that favor bringing the full team home rather than isolating or replacing a single member. The return voyage from the ISS to Earth takes between 12 and 20 hours, from undocking to splashdown.
If Crew-11 does leave early, there are other astronauts on board to keep an eye on the ISS, including NASA’s Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev. That would mean scaling back some of the experiments on board for the time being to focus instead on basic station operations until reinforcements arrive.
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