Speechless in space: The curious case of a NASA astronaut who could not speak for 20 minutes
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Speechless in space: The curious case of a NASA astronaut who could not speak for 20 minutes")
NASA astronaut who suffered medical episode on ISS has spoken on his issue. Photograph: (NASA)
The NASA astronaut who fell sick on the International Space Station has spoken out about his condition. Surprisingly, doctors have not been able to find the reason for his sudden illness that prompted the first medical evacuation from space.
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke was shocked when he suffered an unexplained medical emergency aboard the space station a day before a scheduled spacewalk in January. Within days, the entire crew was evacuated in what was the space agency's first-ever medical evacuation. In an interview, Fincke has revealed that suddenly, he found himself unable to talk. The 59-year-old has been to space four times and is unsure what caused the problem. He told Associated Press that while eating dinner on January 7 after prepping for a spacewalk, he couldn't speak. He did not experience any pain, and the issue abated on its own within 20 minutes. Seeing him in distress, his crewmates tried to help him and contacted the flight surgeons on the ground. "My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress," he said.
Fincke says he felt fine afterwards, and still does, and the doctors haven't been able to figure out what went wrong. "It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick," he told AP from Houston's Johnson Space Center. This was the first time Fincke experienced something this strange in space. He described it as "a very, very fast lightning bolt" that struck out of nowhere. Doctors are sure he did not suffer a heart attack, and there was no choking either.
Notably, he had been in space for 5 ½ months when the medical episode happened. Fincke said that the issue could be linked to his 549 days of weightlessness. He has undergone several medical tests, but did not share further details over concerns of medical privacy among other astronauts.
NASA scanning past data to check for similar instances
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Now, NASA is trying to understand what could have happened and whether any other astronauts experienced something similar in the past. Crew 11 returned on January 15 aboard a SpaceX rocket. US astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yu had been in space since August 2025 and were due to perform a spacewalk on January 8. Fincke, for whom it would have been his tenth spacewalk, and flight engineer Zena Cardman were to make certain fittings. However, it was scrapped because of the medical issue. The 59-year-old said he feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be cancelled. NASA's new administrator, Jared Isaacman, told him to stop feeling sorry since “it wasn't him, but space.”
