Four NASA astronauts have splash-landed back on Earth after being evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS).
It is the first ever medical evacuation in the lab’s history.
The crew landed off the coast of California on Thursday after an 11-hour descent in the Dragon Endeavour.
It will be the first time the astronauts have breathed air or felt gravity since August 2025.
Why have the astronauts been evacuated?
NASA named the returning crew as American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.
Only one member of the crew is suffering from a health condition, but for safety reasons, they couldn’t return to Earth alone.
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Not an emergancy
The ISS crew must always travel in pairs, and NASA needed to return all of Crew-11 on the same capsule that they used to travel to the ISS.
The nature of the medical issue wasn’t disclosed for privacy reasons, but NASA insisted that it wasn’t an emergency.
The affected crewmember “was and continues to be in stable condition,” NASA official Rob Navias said on Wednesday.
Who is left on the ISS?
The ISS is now being crewed by American astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who arrived at the station in November 2025.
The ISS is one of the few areas of bilateral co-operation left between the United States and Russia.
It is set to be decommissioned after 2030, when it will be left to break up in the atmosphere over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, a spacecraft graveyard.
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