NASA Still Trying to Figure Out Why Astronaut Was Hospitalized After Return to Earth

"Everyone’s different, and that’s the part you can’t predict."

Discretion Advised

Last month, three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut were diverted to a hospital in Florida upon returning to Earth from the International Space Station — and the cause of the debacle has still not been made public.

As SpaceNews reports, astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, and Jeanette Epps — the three Americans who were taken to a Pensacola hospital upon their return to terra firma in late October instead of going straight to Houston — said in a recent press conference at NASA headquarters that they're in good health and good spirits since that bizarre incident.

"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," Barratt said over the weekend at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're still piecing things together."

A trained medical doctor with a "passion" for space medicine, the Washington-born astronaut referred only to the post-splashdown hospitalizations as a "medical event" and kept the agency line when saying he would not disclose which astronaut was hospitalized overnight.

"In the fullness of time," Barratt continued, "we will allow this to come out."

Cone of Silence

Later in the presser, Barratt's crewmates Jeanette Epps and Matthew Dominick offered little in the way of clues about which of the four Crew-8 members needed to be hospitalized when all four were taken to a medical facility in October.

"Everyone’s different," Epps said, "and that’s the part you can’t predict."

Dominick went on to provide his own anecdote about his difficulty re-adjusting to being back on Earth after spending seven months in space — which, notably, was weeks longer than expected after the one-two punch of Boeing's disastrous Starliner launch and Hurricanes Milton and Helene pushed the astronauts' return back repeatedly.

"The big things you expect, being disoriented, being dizzy," Dominick said, per The Guardian's reporting. "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."

Whatever happened up there, the three NASA astronauts are keeping mum — and given that we haven't heard much out of Russia about its cosmonaut Crew-8 member, Alexander Grebenkin, we presume Roscosmos is advising discretion as well.

More on the NASA hospitalizations: News Outlets Are Falsely Reporting That a NASA Astronaut Is Still in the Hospital