It’s refreshing to hear a government organization being upfront and honest for once. Astronaut Col. Mike Fincke has been making the rounds this week, explaining what happened to him and why he needed to be evacuated from the International Space Station.
Fincke and the rest of the SpaceX Crew-11 members, Zena Cardman, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov, were launched into space on August 1, 2025, and were scheduled to return sometime in February 2026. However, the mission had to be cut short due to a medical problem that Fincke experienced.
Fincke was scheduled to perform a spacewalk on January 8, 2026, but while eating dinner the day before, the other crew members noticed that he wasn’t talking and appeared to be in distress of some kind. They quickly ruled out choking and a heart attack, and twenty minutes after the incident started, Fincke came out of it and was once again functioning normally.
After reviewing the incident and being unable to determine the cause, NASA decided it made sense to end the mission early, and Fincke and the rest of the SpaceX Crew-11 were evacuated from the ISS. The craft splashed down on Jan 15, 2026, with the mission cut short by about a month. The crew had spent 167 days in space before evacuating.
Fincke says he has little memory of what happened, but now appears to be back to normal. NASA and the doctors from the Scripps Memorial Hospital agree after examining him and finding no evidence of a problem.
I think NASA made the right call on this one. Anything could have been going on, and it made sense to be on the safe side. Although I’m sure they’ll be some guesses, I suspect we’ll never really know what happened; space medicine is still relatively new, and how people react in the long term to micro-gravity is still pretty much unknown.
I give NASA and Fincke credit for sharing the information with us. There was a lot of speculation and rumors, and this seems to clear things up.
