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Three Nasa astronauts who were taken to a Florida hospital after returning to Earth from the International Space Station two weeks ago told reporters on Friday that they were all in good health following the medical ordeal – and that the agency was “still piecing things together” about what happened.
Michael Barrett, pilot of the crew that splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 25 October after seven months in orbit, gave few further details at a press conference in Houston, citing medical privacy laws that he said prevented him from discussing the episode in detail.
“Space flight is still something we don’t fully understand. We’re finding things that we don’t expect sometimes – this was one of those times,” he said.
“We’re still piecing things together. I’m a medical doctor, space medicine is my passion, and how we adapt, how we experience human space flight, is something that we all take very seriously. In the fullness of time, we will allow this to come out.”
Barrett was joined at Nasa headquarters by crewmates Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps. A fourth member, the Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, was not present.
All four were diverted to the Ascension Sacred Heart hospital in Pensacola, in what Nasa said was “an abundance of caution”, soon after their landing in a SpaceX capsule following 235 days in space.
One of the crew, who has not been identified, was “briefly detained” at the hospital but was released “in good health” to continue what it called post-flight reconditioning, the US space agency said at the time.
On Friday, during their first public appearance since the end of the mission, the three Americans spoke about their first days back on Earth.
“The big things you expect, being disoriented, being dizzy. But the little things, like just sitting in a hard chair, my backside has not really sat in a hard thing for 235 days … It’s rather uncomfortable, right? I did not expect that, right?” Dominick, the mission’s commander, said.
“I remember like the third or fourth day after we got back, we were sitting outside on our patio, with my family eating dinner, and I just wanted to be a part of the family and be there with the activities, but I couldn’t sit on that hard chair any more. I just laid a towel down on the ground.”
The mission had been expected to end in August, but the astronauts were directed to stay on the International Space Station (ISS) for two extra months in part because of technical issues surrounding the ill-fated maiden crewed voyage of Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.
Starliner’s astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, are still onboard the ISS, five months after what was planned to be a week-long mission. They will not come home until at least February.
The return of Barrett and his crewmates, meanwhile, was postponed by about a further two weeks because of weather, including Hurricane Milton’s rampage across the Gulf of Mexico in early October.
“You’re like, are we going home tomorrow? You call your wife, like, hey, we’re coming home tomorrow, and then we’re not, and then we’re coming home, no, next week. Maybe,” Dominick said.
“That part was entertaining to deal with, but it was definitely great to spend bonus time in space.”