US astronaut says illness that cut short space mission made him unable to talk

Nasa astronaut Mike Fincke is helped out of the SpaceX Crew-11 capsule after it landed near San Diego, California, in January.

Photo: Nasa via AP The astronaut who prompted Nasa’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said on Friday that doctors still do not know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on January 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened.

He could not 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 from Houston’s Johnson Space Centre.

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.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he was not choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness.

He was 5½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt”.

Recovery vessels approach Nasa’s SpaceX Crew-11 capsule after a middle-of-the-night splashdown near San Diego, California, in January.

Photo: Nasa via AP “My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress,” he said, with all six gathering around him. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.” Fincke said he could not provide any more details about his medical episode.

The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

The space station’s ultrasound machine came in handy when the event occurred, he said, and he has gone through numerous tests since returning to Earth.

Nasa is poring through other astronauts’ medical records to see if any related instances might have happened in space, he said.

Fincke identified himself late last month as the one who was sick to end the swirling public speculation.

He still feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be cancelled – it would have been his 10th spacewalk but the first for crewmate Zena Cardman – and resulted in an early return for her and their two other crewmates. (Clockwise from bottom left) Mike Fincke, Oleg Platonov, Zena Cardman and Kimiya Yu

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