HOUSTON, Jan 8, 2026, 08:07 CST
NASA is weighing a rare early return of its SpaceX Crew-11 team from the International Space Station after an unspecified medical issue involving one astronaut forced the agency to call off a spacewalk planned for Thursday. NASA said the astronaut was in stable condition.
NASA said the medical concern arose Wednesday afternoon aboard the orbiting lab and it would not identify the crew member or share details because of medical privacy. The agency said the situation was stable and it would announce a new date for the postponed spacewalk later.
In an overnight update, NASA said it was evaluating “all options, including the possibility of an earlier end” to Crew-11’s mission and would issue another update within 24 hours. The next U.S. crew rotation flight to the station, SpaceX Crew-12, is currently slated for no earlier than Feb. 15, leaving little slack if managers decide they need to move fast. Bill Spetch, an operations integration manager for NASA’s ISS Program, said the delayed spacewalk work was aimed at adding redundancy to the station’s primary power system. Spaceflight Now
Crew-11 includes NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov, who arrived at the station in August aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The ISS also hosts three other crewmembers who rode up on a Russian Soyuz late last year, underscoring how tightly interlocked the station’s flight schedule can be.
Fincke and Cardman had been due to step outside to prepare the station for the later installation of new roll-out solar arrays meant to boost power, and to collect microorganism samples near life-support vents. NASA has been upgrading the station’s power system as it extends the outpost’s working life.
The outing — an extravehicular activity, or EVA, NASA’s term for working outside in a spacesuit — would have been Cardman’s first spacewalk and Fincke’s 10th, tying the NASA record. The work was meant to set up a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, or iROSA, a fold-out panel designed to increase available power.
CBS News reported that station audio captured Yui requesting a private medical conference with mission control in Houston on Wednesday afternoon, before public word of the medical concern. Later, the station’s normally continuous audio stream went silent without explanation, the report said.
