The story that has actually made big media news:
Probably the bigger story to lead with is to bring everyone up to date to what happened to Mike Fincke that led to the urgent medical evacuation of the International Space Station back in February.
In the last couple of days Fincke spoke in public about what it was for the first time. From the Associated Press and dated Friday, March 27th:
Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.
“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.
Fincke points out that he was tested with the medical equipment on the station which showed nothing in particular and once back on the ground the tests involved more sophisticated scans, after which he was told he had no evidence of having had a stroke, or some sort of cardiac event. It has been at least informally associated with his many days in space - AP says he has 549 days in space - far more than just this mission.
Fincke stopped apologizing to everybody after NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman ordered him to stop.
“This wasn’t you. This was space, right?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anybody down.”
Ever the optimist, he’s holding out hope that he can return to space one day.
It sounds good for Mike, although my Anal-Retentive streak says that associating the temporary symptom to his 549 days in space seems weak to me. He's never had it before, and a web search for "temporarily unable to speak" returns a lot of things none of which are related to spaceflight.
And the story that's just for us space geeks
SpaceX's Falcon9 fleet leader, booster B1067 earned a (dash)34 after its serial number this afternoon, lifting another batch of 29 satellites into orbit for mission 10-44. The 34th flight of this booster returned B1067-34 to the fleet leadership, since in the last month since the 33rd flight a couple of other boosters caught up to B1067-33. Liftoff was at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 UTC), and the mission, like virtually all of these Falcon 9 Starlink launches, was almost boringly perfect. Flying to the NE, the worst direction for those of us living south of Cape Canaveral.
Booster 1067 entered the SpaceX fleet in 2021 and since then has launched missions including CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat Hotbird 13G, SES O3B mPOWER-A, PSN Satria, Telkomsat Merah Putih 2, Galileo L13, Koreasat-6A Crew-6 and USSF-124, plus 22 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn't dead center of the target, but it sure wasn't in danger of missing the deck.
Crew-11: left to right: Russia's Oleg Platonov, NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, and Japan's Kimiya Yui on the right. (Image: © SpaceX)
What ties these two stories together is that Mike Fincke's Crew-11 flight wasn't on B1067, but it was on a Falcon 9.
Sounds like he had a, dunno, seizure of some sorts. One of those that can't be diagnosed unless it happens right when the sufferer is having one and is rigged up with all sorts of sensors and stuff.
ReplyDelete'Zoned out' to a serious max, sort of.
Good on Isaacman telling him to stop and get over it. Stuff happens. Good call.
And, yes, only SpaceX setting records other companies can only imagine setting.
According to my web search with Duck Duck Go, something like he had is not uncommon. Last night, I searched on "temporarily unable to speak" but I just searched on "suddenly unable *** " and there were more entries in total and a larger percentage implied a stroke or other serious problem.
DeleteTransient ischemic attack, " a temporary blockage of blood flow to the brain that causes stroke-like symptoms for a few minutes up to 24 hours without permanent damage" -Google, may or may not be related to varying degrees to weightlessness or increased gravities of launch. A new one to Nasa and space medicine. Mostly, on earth, it happens to older folks.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jeff. I was typing the comment tagged at 8:58 - and doing two or three other things - as you added this.
DeleteReassuringly, people can live with it for decades.
DeleteA TIA is near impossible to detect within a short time of it occurring. My 90+ year old mother-in-law had some issues that may have been a TIA. The doctors said that any scans need to be done within a couple of hours to detect one.
DeleteWeird. I had something like that about 20 years ago, they got me to Emergency and took a bunch of x-rays and blood work........ nuttin', honey. No pain, everything working perfectly afterwards.
ReplyDeleteBut happening right before a spacewalk is better then DURING the spacewalk!
"But happening right before a spacewalk is better then DURING the spacewalk!"
DeleteAbsolutely!! It would be bad enough to have explosive diarrhea in that EVA suit, but this might even be worse. Once you're in that suit, I think you're in it for HOURS.