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Did NASA say when they're coming back? The article didn't mention it.

Should also mention NASA is trying to move up the launch of Crew 12 to cover some of the gap.

Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency. You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy. We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Demanding every intimate personal detail of a human whose paycheck you happen to underwrite feels a little ... inhumane.
You know that golden ballroom Trump has been constructing with your tax dollars isn’t going to be for the public either…
What possible use is it to the taxpayer to know who was affected by what health condition? NASA knows who the person is, if there is any lesson to be learned this policy isn't stopping them. What lesson do you, random citizen, expect to learn? What would you do differently if you had access to this information?

If it is policy to overshare medical details, that might lead astronauts to delay or refuse to give medical information that does matter to the mission. Before we talk at all of medical ethics, on purely pragmatic grounds this information ought to be confidential.

I don't think taxes being used can justify a breach of medical confidentiality
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.

I'm sure NASA is keeping good records and will take lessons learned from this situation, but they can do that without blasting someone's private medical information out publicly.

Related question. Have transmittable diseases spread in space? What examples do we know of?
AFAIK no one have died in space from medical issues yet. Only accidents.
There was one cosmonaut who died shortly after emergency return to the Earth. I think it was in the 90s, but maybe eariler.
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It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
I used to work in ISS mission control, this is not an emergency return but an early return

Also coming down on the Soyuz is pretty routine and only takes a few hours- I’d say it was overall a far less risky situation than being in Antarctic on a deep ocean vessel with appendicitis etc

We have dozens and (hundreds behind them) of men and women monitoring those folks from a global network of control centers 24 hrs a day- The station is mostly commanded from the ground and plans and procedures exist for everything

- if anything its all over orchestrated and over-planned in my opinion, owing to national politics, corporate contracts and international bureaucracy

Is it risky- yes obviously-but I’d argue its less risky then being out at the south pole in winter

See: https://nasawatch.com/iss-news/crew-medical-telecon-summary/

I think the responses to your comment speak volumes about how insular the office worker filter bubble of HN is.

There's dozens upon dozens of professions where things go wrong infinitely faster than they do in medical situations.

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I remember reading about all of the foibles of Apollo 7 and how that was caused by the astronauts all getting a head cold and being miserable and irritable, or how Frank Borman got so space sick on Apollo 8 he recorded a secret message in the data dump for the doctor to bypass the capcom, and I’m curious how this now became a pseudo-political issue.
> certain groups of online warriors are convinced she is the one who is sick because of the "women are weak and can't do man work" trope.

Care to point to anything specific that leads you to believe this?

> So keep that in mind when people are demanding transparency.

Why should the (possible?) existence of online groups have any bearing on public policy like this? Probably for many policy decisions, we can find some online group that would spin it a certain way in their minds. That doesn't mean we let it influence our decisions one way or the other. Or to be precise, not any more than what the proportion of the voting population they make up would imply.

The ISS is a good example of a fully isolated environment. No new bacteria or viruses arrive there apart from spacecraft arrivals.

I've been curious for a while what human health would look like if there was a small group of people isolated for many decades. Would they effectively be disease free after the first few weeks?

As well as removing flu and colds, might it also reduce things like heart disease and Alzheimer's which we have weak evidence are linked to transmissible diseases?