An Astronaut’s Sudden Inability to Speak Prompted the ISS’s First Medical Evacuation. Doctors Still Don’t Know What Caused the Issue

The individual who fell ill, NASA’s Mike Fincke, says the medical team is almost certain that the issue was related to being in space

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

April 3, 2026

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About three months ago, a then-unnamed member of the SpaceX Crew-11 experienced a health issue while aboard the International Space Station (ISS), leading to the first-ever medical evacuation of the spacecraft in its 25 years of operation.

Since then, Mike Fincke—a 59-year-old NASA astronaut and retired U.S. Air Force colonel—has come forward as the person who had the problem, but doctors still aren’t sure why he fell ill. He experienced a roughly 20-minute episode that rendered him unable to speak, although he remembers no pain, and no similar incidents have happened to him before or since, reports the Associated Press’ Marcia Dunn.

“The good news is that we got a lot of good data to show that it wasn’t anything bad. I didn’t have a stroke. I didn’t have a heart attack,” Fincke says in an interview with NBC News’ Tom Costello. “Now it’s just trying to figure out what exactly is going on. We’re almost 100 percent sure that this is a space-related thing.”

At the time of the incident on January 7, Fincke and his three crewmates—NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kimiya Yui and Russian Federal Space Agency's Oleg Platonov—had been at the ISS for a little over five months. Fincke has logged a total of 549 days in space, according to his NASA profile.

He was eating dinner when the medical problem happened: He suddenly couldn’t talk. “My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress,” Fincke tells the AP. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.”

His colleagues quickly contacted flight surgeons who were on the ground, and they helped the ISS team stabilize Fincke’s condition, he says in an interview with CBS News’ Vladimir Duthiers and Adriana Diaz.

“Before we fly, they make sure we are extremely healthy individuals. … The chances for any of these kinds of things are very small,” he says. “It’s very surprising to all of us that anything happened.”

NASA soon announced it would postpone a spacewalk that was slated for the next day, and then decided to bring all four SpaceX crew members back to Earth about a month early. During a January 8 press briefing, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called Fincke’s episode—undisclosed at the time—a “serious medical condition.” While the event did not constitute an “emergency deorbit,” Isaacman said, “the capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station.”

Still, an ultrasound machine on the ISS helped during the episode, he tells the AP, and he’s gone through a battery of health tests since returning to the planet. “Just a few hours [after splash down] I was getting some really great scans,” at a medical center in California, he tells CBS News.

But “the doctors are still scratching their heads” about this incident, Fincke tells NBC News. NASA officials are looking through other astronauts’ medical records to see if anyone else has experienced a similar health problem in space, he says to the AP.  

With NASA’s ambitious goals to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually get humans to Mars, the medical incident is providing valuable insight about how to handle such problems beyond Earth.

The crew “did as well as we possibly could have,” says Cardman, who aided Fincke on the ISS, to NBC News. “I think this is actually a really great exercise, and we’ll be able to apply these lessons as we go farther afield.”

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Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.