Four people on NASA's Crew-11 mission successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in their SpaceX Dragon capsule after a nearly 10-hour journey from the International Space Station, completing the first medical evacuation from the orbiting lab.
The crew undocked from the station Wednesday at 5:20 p.m. EST as the ISS and capsule flew 260 miles south of Australia.
The splashdown at 3:41 a.m. EST Thursday beneath a canopy of parachutes marks the end of the Crew-11 mission, which was cut short by about a month. It's the first time in NASA's history that a medical issue prompted an early end to a space mission. It's also the first medical evacuation in over a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the space station.
NASA has not disclosed the name of the astronaut or the medical issue due to health privacy.
The decision to bring home the crew of NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov was made last week. NASA announced one of the astronauts had a serious but stable condition that prompted the cancellation of a planned spacewalk 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. All four had to return because the capsule was their only ride to and from the space station.
Their mission began on Aug. 1, 2025 with a 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 on board the space station, logging 2,672 orbits of the Earth – their journey tallying 70.8 million statute miles.
Their departure now leaves the space station with just three people. Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev, along with NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, who arrived at the station in a Soyuz capsule on Nov. 27, 2025, just a few hours after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia.
Since SpaceX began launching operational missions to the station in 2020, the International Space Station has typically hosted an operational crew of seven.
The reduced crew means fewer experiments and reduced maintenance can take place on the ISS. SpaceX's Crew-12 mission, the next crew rotation for the station, is set to launch no earlier than Feb. 15 from Florida's Space Coast, carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
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