Four astronauts who had to depart the International Space Station early due to a medical issue were expected to splash down off the coast of San Diego County overnight Thursday.
The space agency said the U.S.-Japanese-Russian crew of four from the SpaceX Crew-11 mission are targeted to splash down around 12:41 a.m. Thursday, although readiness, weather and other factors could affect timing.
It’s the first time in the space station’s 25-year history that a mission was cut short due to a medical issue while in orbit. NASA has not shared details about the affected crew member due to medical privacy. However, they have confirmed the astronaut is stable.
Watch the astronauts’ return to Earth starting at 11:15 p.m. PT here
NASA and SpaceX moved their splashdowns off the coast of San Diego last April, making it possible for the four astronauts to land there Thursday morning.
“Crew 11 Crew ready to come home,” a NASA spokesperson said during a livestream of the Dragon capsule carrying the four astronauts as they prepared for their journey back to Earth.
NASA’s Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov left for the International Space Station last August and spent 167 days there. They should have remained on the space station until late February.
Computer modeling predicted a medical evacuation from the space station every three years, but NASA hasn’t had one in its 65 years of human spaceflight.
David Neville, communications director with the San Diego Air and Space Museum, said the capsule is expected to be recovered by the Space X Crew.
“What they do is they determine the weather conditions, the wave conditions, and what everything’s going to be like,” Neville said.
According to NASA, the journey back is expected to take about 10.5 hours.
“The deorbit burn happens about 51 minutes when they’re coming through the atmosphere, and then they’ll deploy parachutes, blow parachutes when they’re pretty high up, and then lower ones when they get even closer to the spacecraft. So it hits the water at about 25 miles per hour,” Neville said.
Neville said a recovery ship will then drag the spacecraft up aboard on the dock and another recovery ship will help secure it.
Last year, NASA and SpaceX moved the splashdown operations from Florida to the West Coast because of its larger recovery zone. SpaceX said Pacific splashdowns will ensure that any surviving pieces of the trunk — jettisoned near flight’s end — falls into the ocean.
“It really brings it home,” Neville said. “Recovery teams are based here in San Diego, which is wonderful. It’s very neat. It’s just an opportunity for San Diegans — for Southern Californians — to really be involved in the space program.”
The last people to return from space to the Pacific were the three NASA astronauts assigned to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Neville said the landing will not be visible to the naked eye, so the best way to watch the splashdown is on YouTube, which will be streaming it live.
Neville said the landing will be a good precursor to next month’s expected Launch of Artemis II, which will take a crew back to the moon for the first time since 1972. That orbit around the moon will be the farthest humans have been from Earth in history.
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