iss

78 Articles

ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

January 15, 2026 by 21 Comments

Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.

Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California.  This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.

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A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future

September 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.

While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.

But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space

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Dragon Is The Latest, And Final, Craft To Reboost ISS

September 11, 2025 by 48 Comments

The International Space Station has been in orbit around the Earth, at least in some form, since November of 1998 — but not without help. In the vacuum of space, an object in orbit can generally be counted on to remain zipping around more or less forever, but the Station is low enough to experience a bit of atmospheric drag. It isn’t much, but it saps enough velocity from the Station that without regular “reboosts” to speed it back up , the orbiting complex would eventually come crashing down.

Naturally, the United States and Russia were aware of this when they set out to assemble the Station. That’s why early core modules such as Zarya and Zvezda came equipped with thrusters that could be used to not only rotate the complex about all axes, but accelerate it to counteract the impact of drag. Eventually the thrusters on Zarya were disabled, and its propellant tanks were plumbed into Zvezda’s fuel system to provide additional capacity.