Author: Mary UpritchardInnovaSpace Admin Director & Space Fan! If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this week, you will have seen that NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back from the International Space Station early due to a “medical issue.” No great details given due to privacy rights, so no name, no diagnosis, and no great drama. Nonetheless, this lack of detail always leads to worry, much speculation and many clickbait headlines to boost page visitor numbers. But to be honest, this event holds no great mystery, it’s nothing weird, in fact, it’s probably overdue!  ISS orbiting the Earth - Image credit: NASA Space is not a natural place for the human body to liveWhen we think of space exploration, we generally think of it as something heroic - big rockets, brave astronauts floating around and amazing photos of our planet Earth. What we don’t really talk about is that space is quietly hostile to the human body, not in an exploding spacesuit sci-fi drama sort of way, but in a slow, grinding, biological manner. The simple fact is that microgravity messes with almost everything:
Astronauts are not ‘ill’ in space in the usual sense, but they are also not ‘normal’ anymore. Instead, their bodies are constantly adapting and compensating for the lack of gravity, and slowly using up their safety margins.
A crew-11 member didn’t break anything – they just hit a limit NASA has not revealed exactly what happened to the Crew-11 astronaut who needed to come home and they probably never will. However, the important part really isn’t the specific symptom. The important part is that someone’s body crossed a line where Earth became safer than orbit. This is less about a mission failure and more about highlighting the reality of long-duration spaceflight. The ISS has been permanently occupied for more than 25 years. In that time, astronauts have had all kinds of health issues up there, even if they were rarely described that way, for example:
Most of it is explained away in polite language like “out of an abundance of caution” or for “operational reasons”, but this time, Crew-11 has said the quiet part out loud. Space exploration is moving away from adventure to exposureEarly space missions were short, just days or weeks. You could grit your teeth and push through, and before you knew it you were returning to Earth again. Nowadays, astronauts live on the ISS for six months, and sometimes longer. That turns spaceflight into something very different. It’s no longer a short sprint but more of a long-distance race, with slow exposure to an environment for which the human body was never designed. Astronauts these days are less like explorers and more like participants in long medical experiments, and sometimes experiments can end early.  Author produced image, assisted by DALL-E So, this is where space medicine really matters InnovaSpace Director, Thais Russomano, is a doctor who specialised in space medicine and human physiology, and she will often say that space doesn’t suddenly break you. Rather, it slowly begins to nudge every single body system away from where it is accustomed to being. Most of the time, the body copes and adapts, but sometimes, it doesn’t. So, if NASA says someone needs to come home for medical reasons, it isn’t a mystery. It should be taken as a reminder that although human bodies are incredible, they still come with limits.
Fortunately for Crew-11, being on the ISS means they could come home relatively easily. But what of a Moon crew - maybe not - and a Mars crew - definitely not. There is no quick splashdown from deep space. This story perhaps reflects not so much on one astronaut on one mission, but sharply highlights where we are on a bigger journey. We are leaving the era of “Can humans survive in space?” and entering a new era of “Just how long can humans survive in space?” Comments are closed.
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