Space skeleton crew: Just 3 astronauts will run the ISS after Crew-11's medical evacuation
NASA will bring four astronauts back to Earth early due to a health issue, leaving the International Space Station with just three crewmembers. But that's the way it used to be.
The International Space Station. (Image credit: NASA)
The International Space Station will soon be down to a skeleton crew.
On Thursday (Jan. 8), NASA announced that it will bring the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission back to Earth early to deal with a health issue with one of the crewmembers. We don't know yet when this will happen; an update is expected in the next day or so.
The quartet's departure will leave the International Space Station (ISS) with just three resident astronauts — NASA's Christopher Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. While the medical evacuation will be a first for the ISS, a three-person crew is far from unprecedented.
Since 2020, the nominal crew size for the ISS has been seven astronauts. The previous baseline, established in 2009, was six. But the standard before that, which held for nearly a decade, was three.
Williams will be the only astronaut on the American segment of the ISS after Crew-11 departs, but NASA is confident that he can handle the responsibility.
"Chris is trained to do every task that we would ask him to do on the vehicle," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a press conference on Thursday afternoon (Jan. 8).
He noted that Williams will have a considerable amount of help.
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"Of course, we also do a lot of the operations of the vehicle from our various control centers all over the world, including commercial control centers that operate a lot of our research payloads," Kshatriya said. "So, he will have thousands of people looking over his shoulder, like our crews do all the time to help ensure that they continue the groundbreaking science."
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev — who flew to the ISS on Nov. 27 with Williams aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft — could also lend a hand if needed, according to Kshatriya.
