Mysterious Circumstances

After landing back on Earth, a NASA astronaut was taken to the hospital for an unidentified health issue — and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the situation.

In an update, NASA said that all four members of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission from the International Space Station were flown to a medical facility in Pensacola, Florida instead of going back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

It’s unclear which of the three astronauts on board the Crew Dragon capsule — Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps — was hospitalized because NASA is protecting their identity. (We can rule out Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin because we know the individual works for NASA and not Roscomos.)

Though we don’t know who was hospitalized or why they needed medical attention, NASA did say that the individual is “in stable condition” and is remaining in the Pensacola hospital “as a precautionary measure.”

Beyond that, the agency said it will not be publicizing any “specific details on the individual’s condition” to protect their medical privacy and identity.

Fall For You

This isn’t the first time a NASA astronaut has had a medical emergency soon after returning to Earth.

Back in 2006, ISS mission specialist Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper collapsed twice on camera during her speech at a welcome home ceremony just a day after touching down back on terra firma. Though she wasn’t hospitalized, she did have to be escorted out of a side door at the hangar where the celebration was held in Houston, as the Associated Press reported at the time.

The astronaut’s husband Glenn Piper attributed his wife’s wobble to a mix of Texas heat, excitement, and the difficulty of reacclimating to Earth after spending nearly two weeks in zero gravity.

As fellow astronaut and flight surgeon Smith Johnston told the AP at the time, astronauts typically lose between 10 and 14 percent of their blood volume when they’re in space, and it can take a few days to get it all back.

“It’s like they just went to the blood bank,” Johnston told the news outlet.

As that nearly two-decade-old debacle illustrates, space travel is brutal on the body — and there could be any number of reasons why the NASA astronaut who returned on the SpaceX Crew Dragon needed medical attention.

And hey, at least they’re not stuck up there like their two coworkers who rode up on Boeing’s dubious Starliner and won’t be able to come back home until February 2025.

More on astronautical happenings: MIT Scientists Invent Doctor Octopus-Style “SuperLimbs” for Stumbling Astronauts