The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth.<\/p>\n
In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual circumstances. Then, on October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified \u201cmedical issue\u201d after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released \u201cin good health\u201d and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities.<\/p>\n
The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. The three NASA astronauts on the Dragon spacecraft included commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin accompanied the three NASA crew members. Russia\u2019s space agency confirmed he was not hospitalized after returning to Earth.<\/p>\n
Dominick, Barratt, and Epps answered media questions in a post-flight press conference Friday, but they did not offer more information on the medical issue or say who experienced it. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpaceflight is still something we don\u2019t fully understand,\u201d said Barratt, a medical doctor and flight surgeon. \u201cWe\u2019re finding things that we don\u2019t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we\u2019re still piecing things together on this, and so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we\u2019re going to say about that event at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
NASA typically makes astronaut health data available to outside researchers, who regularly publish papers while withholding identifying information about crew members. NASA officials often tout gaining knowledge about the human body\u2019s response to spaceflight as one of the main purposes of the International Space Station. The agency is subject to federal laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, restricting the release of private medical information.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,\u201d Barratt said. \u201cI said we\u2019re not going to talk about it. I\u2019m a medical doctor. Space medicine is my passion\u2026 and how we adapt, how we experience human spaceflight is something that we all take very seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barratt said NASA will release more information about the astronaut\u2019s post-flight medical issue \u201cin the fullness of time.\u201d This was Barratt\u2019s third trip to space and the first spaceflight for Dominick and Epps.<\/p>\n
One of the most famous incidents involving hospitalized astronauts was in 1975, before the passage of the HIPAA medical privacy law, when NASA astronauts Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand stayed at a military hospital in Hawaii nearly two weeks after inhaling toxic propellant fumes that accidentally entered their spacecraft\u2019s internal cabin as it descended under parachutes. They were returning to Earth at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, in which they docked their Apollo command module to a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s view\u2014and perhaps the public\u2019s, too\u2014of medical privacy has changed in the nearly 50 years since. On that occasion, NASA disclosed that the astronauts suffered from lung irritation, and officials said Brand briefly passed out from the fumes after splashdown, remaining unconscious until his crewmates fitted an oxygen mask tightly over his face. NASA and the military also made doctors available to answer media questions about their condition.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The medical concern after splashdown last month was not the only part of the Crew-8 mission that remains shrouded in mystery. Dominick and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson were supposed to go outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk June 13, but NASA called off the excursion, citing a \u201cspacesuit discomfort issue.\u201d NASA replaced Dominick with Barratt and rescheduled the spacewalk for June 24 to retrieve a faulty electronics box and collect microbial samples from the exterior of the space station. But that excursion ended after just 31 minutes, when Dyson reported a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of her spacesuit.<\/p>\n
While Barratt discussed the water leak in some detail Friday, Dominick declined to answer a question from Ars regarding the suit discomfort issue. \u201cWe\u2019re still reviewing and trying to figure all the details,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Regarding the water leak, Barratt said he and Dyson noticed her suit had a \u201cspewing umbilical, which was quite dramatic, actually.\u201d The decision to abandon the spacewalk was a \u201cno-brainer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not a trivial leak, and we\u2019ve got footage,\u201d Barratt said. \u201cAnybody who was watching NASA TV at the time could see there was basically a snowstorm, a blizzard, spewing from the airlock because we already had the hatch open. So we were seeing flakes of ice in the airlock, and Tracy was seeing a lot of them on her helmet, on her gloves, and whatnot. Dramatic is the right word, to be real honest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dyson, who came back to Earth in September on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, reconnected the leaking umbilical with her gloves and helmet covered with ice, with restricted vision. \u201cTracy\u2019s actions were nowhere short of heroic,\u201d Barratt said.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just made it happen,\u201d Barratt said. \u201cSo, yeah, there was this drama. Everything worked out fine. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barratt said the leak wasn\u2019t caused by any procedural error as the astronauts prepared their suits for the spacewalk.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was definitely a hardware issue,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was a little poppet valve on the interface that didn\u2019t quite seat, so really, the question became why didn\u2019t that seat? We solved that problem by changing out the whole umbilical.\u201d<\/p>\n
By then, NASA\u2019s attention on the space station had turned to other tasks, such as experiments, the arrival of a new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing\u2019s Starliner crew capsule docked at the complex, before it ultimately departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn\u2019t urgent, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to attempt the spacewalk again as soon as January with a different set of astronauts.<\/p>\n
Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the space station are good to go for the next spacewalk. However, the suits are decades old, and their original designs date back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the units for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop a replacement suit for use in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to build new spacesuits for servicing the International Space Station and future orbiting research outposts.<\/p>\n
\u201cNone of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use and not really upgrading,\u201d Barratt said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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