NASA’s Crew-11 returns after short 5-month space mission: NPR

Four people on NASA’s Crew-11 mission successfully landed in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in their SpaceX Dragon capsule after a nearly 10-hour flight from the International Space Station, completing the first medical evacuation from the orbiting laboratory.

The crew Disconnected from the station Wednesday at 5:20 PM EDT as the International Space Station and capsule flew 260 miles south of Australia.

The landing at 3:41 a.m. EDT Thursday under a canopy of parachutes marked the end of Crew-11’s mission, which was cut short by about a month. It is the first time in NASA history that a medical problem has led to the early termination of a space mission. It is also the first medical evacuation in more than a quarter century of continuous human presence on the space station.

NASA did not reveal the astronaut’s name or medical problem due to health privacy.

The decision to return the crew of NASA astronauts Zina Cardman and Mike Finke, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov was made last week. NASA announced that one of the astronauts was in a serious but stable condition, prompting the cancellation of a spacewalk mission scheduled for last Thursday. The decision was made the next day to return the astronaut – along with the rest of the crew – for medical evaluation back on Earth. The four had to return because the capsule was their only trip to and from the space station.

Their mission began on August 1, 2025, with the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then, the crew has spent a total of 167 days in space and 165 days aboard the space station, clocking 2,672 Earth orbits — their journey totaling 70.8 million statute miles.

Their departure now leaves the space station with only three people. Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, along with NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, arrived at the station in a Soyuz capsule on November 27, 2025, just a few hours after their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia.

Since SpaceX began launching operational missions to the station in 2020, the ISS has typically hosted an operational crew of seven.

A reduced crew means fewer experiments and potentially less maintenance on the ISS. SpaceX crew mission 12, The station’s next crew launch is scheduled to take place no later than February 15 from Florida’s Space Coast, carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adino and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fedyev.