By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A NASA astronaut was flown to a hospital with an unspecified medical situation on Friday shortly after returning to Earth from an almost eight-month mission on the Worldwide Area Station, the U.S. house company mentioned.
The astronaut, who NASA didn’t title for privateness causes, had splashed down off Florida’s coast at 3:29 a.m. ET (0729 GMT) on Friday aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule with three different crew members – two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut.
The crew included U.S. astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. Their 235 days in house made it longer than the same old six-month ISS mission length and marked the longest keep in orbit for SpaceX’s reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft.
NASA initially mentioned your complete crew was transported to the medical heart for added analysis and out of an abundance of warning, however didn’t specify whether or not all or a portion of the crew had been experiencing points.
NASA later mentioned it was one in every of its astronauts who skilled a medical situation and that the crew had been flown to a hospital in Pensacola, Florida, close to the splashdown web site. The three different crew members have since left the hospital and returned to Houston, the house company mentioned.
“The one astronaut who remains at Ascension is in stable condition under observation as a precautionary measure,” NASA mentioned in a press release, referring to Ascension Sacred Coronary heart Pensacola hospital. The company mentioned it won’t share the character of the astronaut’s situation.
Russia’s house company, Roscosmos, posted on the social messaging platform Telegram a photograph of Grebenkin standing upright and smiling, with a caption studying: “After a space mission and splashdown, cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin feels great!”
The crew’s return from the soccer field-sized science lab 250 miles up in orbit had been delayed for weeks due to two hurricanes that swept by means of the U.S. southeast close to Crew Dragon’s anticipated splashdown zones.
SpaceX maintains a fleet of reusable spacecraft and has flown to the ISS 44 instances. The Elon Musk-owned firm stays the one U.S. choice for NASA astronaut journeys to and from the ISS. Boeing (NYSE:)’s Starliner, meant as a second U.S. journey, has been hobbled by years of improvement points.
Crew Dragon safely undocked from the ISS on Wednesday afternoon and reentered Earth’s environment early Friday morning, deploying parachutes earlier than plunking into the Gulf of Mexico.
At a post-splashdown information briefing, a NASA official mentioned “the crew is doing great” and made no point out of any points with the astronauts. He famous two hitches with Crew Dragon’s parachute deployment.
Richard Jones, deputy supervisor of NASA’s Business Crew Program, mentioned Crew Dragon’s preliminary set of braking parachutes suffered some “debris strikes” and that one in every of 4 parachutes in a subsequent set took longer than anticipated to unfurl.
Neither occasion affected crew security, Jones mentioned, calling the splashdown climate “ideal” for the crew’s restoration.
The crew’s reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft was on its fifth flight, logging 702 days in orbit since its first mission, SpaceX’s vice chairman of flight reliability, William Gerstenmaier, a former senior NASA official, instructed reporters throughout the information convention.
