After a long wait, four astronauts are back on Earth. However, one person has to stay in the hospital first.
One of the NASA astronauts who just returned from the International Space Station (ISS) has been hospitalized. The space agency reports this without going into the cause of the illness.
Delayed by weather, four astronauts returned to Earth after around seven months on board the International Space Station. The capsule of the so-called “Crew 8” landed in the sea off the US state of Florida on Friday after a flight of more than 30 hours, as live images from the US space agency NASA showed. “Crew 8” includes NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps as well as Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. They flew with a “Crew Dragon” capsule from tech billionaire Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX, which was recovered shortly after hitting the sea.
During routine medical examinations on the salvage ship, “out of an abundance of caution, additional examination of the crew members was requested,” NASA continued, without elaborating. Three of them were later released, while one of the NASA astronauts remains in hospital “under observation as a precaution.” The name was not mentioned. Further details will be announced at a later date.
The astronauts were actually supposed to fly back to Earth around two weeks ago, but then the plans were disrupted by Storm Milton, which hit Florida as a second-highest Category 3 hurricane and hit the designated water landing zones off the coast there with strong winds and rough seas . Even after the hurricane passed through, the weather conditions remained unfavorable, so NASA had postponed the return date several times.
The astronauts had been on board the ISS since the beginning of March and, among other things, various medical experiments were planned. It was the first space flight for Epps, Grebenkin and Dominick, and Barratt visited the space station for the third time.