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!
The point of training someone to their breaking point is not to make them immune to breaking. It's to give them experience with a realistic battlefield situation and their own physiological responses during it so they stand a basic chance when it does occur.
In the US, many astronauts start as Air Force pilots.
And for the preternaturally calm and confident who don't have the perfect eyesight required to enter the Air Force, many of them apparently serve instead on nuclear submarines...
Astronauts are of a breed apart. They're strapped onto a literally bomb which launches them into a vacuum, and windows where there is no chance of a mission abort. They've pretty much accepted a risk of death that most would simply not tolerate. Ex-military is common for astronauts for a reason.
Not that it really changes the point but modern spacecraft do have an option to abort (begin returning to earth) at just about any time. There's still contingencies where that won't save you of course.
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
The operating depth of most submarines is ~300 -- 500m (980 -- 1640 ft), roughly one-third to one-half the depth you cite.
The two USN nuclear submarines lost due to pressure-hull failures, the Thresher (1963) and Scorpion (1968) both failed at depths of 1,200 to 2,000 ft. Threser's test depth was 1,300 ft (400m), and she was operating at about this depth when communications were lost. Scorpion likely failed at 1,530 ft. (470m).
There are other submersible vessels in the US Navy which can and have operated at greater depths, notably the submersible Alvin and bathyscaphe Trieste II, but those are not combat vessels. Alvin's test deopth is 6,500m (21,300 ft). Triest II's predecessor, Trieste, reached the floor of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, deepest known spot in the oceans, at 10,916m (35,814 ft). Trieste II incorporated the pressure sphere from its predecessor.
A more conventional, but still experimental, submarine, the USS Dophine (AGSS-555) was a deisel-electric research submarine which reached a depth in excess of 3,000 ft (910 m), probably in 1969. The boat was in-service through 2006.
This describes NASA's pre-flight quarantines since Apollo 14, and makes (very brief) references to in-flight diseases (and apparent transmission) prior to Apollo 14 ("upper respiratory infection"; "viral gastroenteritis"),
Technically there has only been one fatal accident in space, the Soyuz 11 failure which killed the crew of three. That occurred above the Karman line, all other spaceflight related fatalities were at much lower altitudes or on the ground.
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.
> 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.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
I'm genuinely fine sharing my medical history, but I don't know if my lack of shame about e.g. testicular torsion, or the way that I lost my notes for a bit and unnecessarily got repeats of vaccines I'd already had, are a sign of being in possession of a boring medical history, or an indication of an uncommonly diminished shame response.
Whatever it is, I am aware that my lack of concern here is something which makes me different from normal people. I don't really get why people in general are ashamed of their medical histories, but I nevertheless absolutely do support everyone's right to keep such secrets, because there's a few specific cases where the medical history reveals something socially damaging either in the present or with a risk of it becoming so in the future, the obvious example of which is an abortion given the US seems to be facing a loss of freedom in this regard.
(Perhaps most people have something socially damaging in their medical histories, and I've just not noticed because nobody says the thing?)
The "I have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work for security, and it doesn't work for health care records either.
You might not have anything to hide now, but you might in the future. Someone you are closest to gets murdered or into a horrific violent accident right in front of you. Despite your best efforts this gives you crippling PTSD and you are committed involuntarily for a 72 hour hold. Now your future employer (legally or not) runs a quick records check and sees you have mental health concerns and really doesn't care about the context. Why roll the dice? Go with the candidate who was in a close 2nd and already a coin flip who doesn't have such a thing in their history.
Plenty of other scenarios that can happen to anyone even if they live the most perfect boring life imaginable and never do anything interesting ever. Plenty more for folks who step off the reservation of "acceptable social/corporate behavior" even a little bit.
Plus, if you want to protect folks like in your example of having an abortion on their record - you need to vehemently defend their right as a boring person yourself as that's the only way such individuals will ever be protected. It's like herd immunity but for privacy.
It's not about the people who have nothing to hide. It's about the people who do.
I don't know about 'a few specific cases'. STIs, mental health issues, pregnancies (interrupted or not, voluntarily or not), contraception methods and/or lapses, anything often misunderstood like MS or neurodegenerative diseases, huntington, substance use/abuse (voluntary or not), victim of assault (sexual or not), sterility/fertility/impotency/incontinence, any manageable medical issue someone might use to not give you a job, to rent you an apartment, although you do actually manage it well...
None of those I'd want shared anywhere, to anyone, against my will. Those (overall) are not rare.
This is not honestly engaging with GP's statement.
The benefit only accrues if the sharing is universal.
I am too private a person to agree with GP, but it does seem that most health issues that are visible to the passerby or casual acquaintence are less stigmatized than the ones that can be hidden. There might be something to the idea.
Of course you'd have to agree that de-stigmatizing is more socially important than privacy. I guess I'm privileged enough to have no stigmas, secret or otherwise, that I consider more important than my privacy. But I know others are less fortunate.
GP did not specify that their thought was scoped to the same people as GGP's (explicitly dystopian) scenario, so I read their comment as working on the kernel of the idea and not the horrifying class-based discriminatory version.
While I am still confident of that assessment, I'll grant you that "obvious" charitable interpretation is not as reliable as it should be. :-/
What difference would this make to you? It would unnecessarily violate someone’s medical privacy for no actual benefit to the public other than satisfying someone’s curiosity.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
Yes, everyone gets privacy. You don’t get to see their private communications back home. You don’t get their medical records.
They aren’t receiving money from taxpayers like a gift. They’re doing a job. It’s ridiculous to demand that they forfeit their privacy because tax money was involved.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
NASA will learn what went wrong here because they’re in a position to act on
You are not in a position to do anything about it. Violating their privacy would make no difference.
Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide),
Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.
Especially since every movement up and down from space is expensive and risks the life of the crew, it'd be a bad idea for NASA to name the astronaut ahead of time.
Disagree; this is completely taxpayer funded and we deserve to know every detail relevant to mission status. In this scenario knowing what illness and why it's grounds for a return is very relevant. That said, I can see NASA delaying information release to figure out a good strategy for it while still respecting any wishes of the sick astronaut with regards to disclosure.
What a strange take. Does this also apply to every soldier in the armed forces? Seems your criteria is equally applicable there.
The relevant people that can do the research and write future policies based on the data obviously will have the information. Not sure what good you think that you personally having it can do.
A single soldier having a medical issue generally doesn't cancel a multi-month mission costing some X large sum of money, requiring another Y large sum of money to even finish cancelling it (returning their unit home).
Therefore it's not relevant and not needed for the public to know.
Yes, I’m sure aircrew never get so violently sick as to affect millions or billions of dollars in crew and and supporting assets due to an emergency, and armed service members are never transported by emergency transportations for eye-watering costs. Technical inequity that ignores facts is the argument of those without arguments.
The specifics of “who” has zero relevance to what is necessary for an ongoing situation; you don’t get to dictate your access and timeline to information just because you contributed a fraction of a penny to something.
These are free people (who happen to have a job that involves a space program). They have the same rights to [try to] keep their medical concerns private as you and I do.
It does cost a lot of money to keep their jobs going, but: They're not slaves. We do not own these people.
Yes, but at the same time I think NASA has long earned the trust to decide these things. Regardless of the issue, nobody wants their health issues aired to the entire world. I am personally okay just not knowing the intimate details.
I think it’s possible to be sufficiently transparent while simultaneously keeping someone’s personal health status private.
As a hypothetical example, it’s possible to disclose if this health issue was known before they were selected for the mission, and if it was, what processes were in place to determine if they should or should not go, etc, all without revealing personal health information.
When I say I want full transparency, I usually am talking about how much pay they received and in the case of elected representatives, their net worth at least once a year.
I wouldn't ask for a full health report to be made public by law. Maybe a summary for elected officials.
Why do you need to know how much they are paid and their net worth? What difference does it make to you? Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well.
Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?
The only medical condition I can think of which they would not disclose is pregnancy. That would lead to further questions and is controversial despite being very simple. Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
> Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
Nope. On a previous mission one of the crew members had to sped a night in hospital after touchdown. They never said who, or what for. This is standard procedure, and for good reason.
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!
How could you keep calm so far away
By going through a ten-year process that selects for calm people.
I can’t imagine any other group who would be as calm as NASA astronauts. Maybe SEALs or other special forces.
It looks like there are a few astronauts that were SEALs, one returned December 9th from the ISS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Kim
Jonny Kim was indeed a SEAL, and a few more things as well, with a CV almost as impressive as Johnny Sins:
> American NASA astronaut, physician, U.S. Navy officer, dual designated naval aviator and flight surgeon, and former Navy SEAL.
Note that "physician" here means Harvard MD.
The point of training someone to their breaking point is not to make them immune to breaking. It's to give them experience with a realistic battlefield situation and their own physiological responses during it so they stand a basic chance when it does occur.
In the US, many astronauts start as Air Force pilots.
And for the preternaturally calm and confident who don't have the perfect eyesight required to enter the Air Force, many of them apparently serve instead on nuclear submarines...
Somewhat related to this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zo62S0ulqhA
Astronauts are of a breed apart. They're strapped onto a literally bomb which launches them into a vacuum, and windows where there is no chance of a mission abort. They've pretty much accepted a risk of death that most would simply not tolerate. Ex-military is common for astronauts for a reason.
Not that it really changes the point but modern spacecraft do have an option to abort (begin returning to earth) at just about any time. There's still contingencies where that won't save you of course.
Going on a spaceship is probably safer than driving a car.
Per mile, sure.
Per launch? I think the "everyone died" rate is about, what, 1.2% of crewed launches?
Not a good sales pitch for commercial space flights
Being an astronaut is about 50x more risky than riding in a car
You know what they say: the most dangerous part of space flight is the car ride to Cape Canaveral.
Over what time period?
whatever is the cause, it is not immediate - or they would've been on the ground couple days ago
so no, not appendix
Pregnancy?
Maybe testicular torsion triggered by zero-G conditions?
That's a "needs to be in the OR in 6 hours" situation; no way they waited several days for it.
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/
or on the way to Mars.
it's only 250 miles
Maximum operating depth of a Nuclear submarine is 3,350 ft.
Source?
The operating depth of most submarines is ~300 -- 500m (980 -- 1640 ft), roughly one-third to one-half the depth you cite.
The two USN nuclear submarines lost due to pressure-hull failures, the Thresher (1963) and Scorpion (1968) both failed at depths of 1,200 to 2,000 ft. Threser's test depth was 1,300 ft (400m), and she was operating at about this depth when communications were lost. Scorpion likely failed at 1,530 ft. (470m).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Cause>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)#Disappe...>
There are other submersible vessels in the US Navy which can and have operated at greater depths, notably the submersible Alvin and bathyscaphe Trieste II, but those are not combat vessels. Alvin's test deopth is 6,500m (21,300 ft). Triest II's predecessor, Trieste, reached the floor of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, deepest known spot in the oceans, at 10,916m (35,814 ft). Trieste II incorporated the pressure sphere from its predecessor.
A more conventional, but still experimental, submarine, the USS Dophine (AGSS-555) was a deisel-electric research submarine which reached a depth in excess of 3,000 ft (910 m), probably in 1969. The boat was in-service through 2006.
I like to imagine GP just accidentally leaked classified info.
The Dolphin is on display at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.
(250 miles is about 400km and 3350 ft is about 1km)
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.
Current schedule is departure Wednesday, splashdown Thursday morning: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/commercialcrew/2026/01/09/nasa-sp...
Reentry should be visible from large parts of the west coast (if they stick to this schedule).
Thanks!
All I know is that SpaceX said dragon and crew-11 would undock no earlier than Wednesday, Jan 14.
>NASA has said it will announce a target return date in the coming days.
Article about how the return capsule works: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52840482
Related question. Have transmittable diseases spread in space? What examples do we know of?
There have been a few instances, IIRC there was an Apollo mission that had a head cold spread among the whole crew.
But that's unlikely to be the case here because they've been up there isolated for over 6 months now
> IIRC there was an Apollo mission that had a head cold spread among the whole crew.
Yep, Apollo 7.
Would it be possible for some food to have been contaminated with something? It seems unlikely.
this is what I'm thinking. GI related issues
This describes NASA's pre-flight quarantines since Apollo 14, and makes (very brief) references to in-flight diseases (and apparent transmission) prior to Apollo 14 ("upper respiratory infection"; "viral gastroenteritis"),
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ochmo-tb-006... ("Health Stabilization Program (HSP)")
AFAIK no one have died in space from medical issues yet. Only accidents.
Technically there has only been one fatal accident in space, the Soyuz 11 failure which killed the crew of three. That occurred above the Karman line, all other spaceflight related fatalities were at much lower altitudes or on the ground.
The other one that comes close is Columbia which broke up at around 60 km.
There was one cosmonaut who died shortly after emergency return to the Earth. I think it was in the 90s, but maybe eariler.
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.
> 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.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
I remember watching a landing and the camera cut away when one of the returning astronauts got sick.
These are human beings and employees not Big Brother contestants.
The full on dystopian take would be to require anyone receiving welfare or other public funds to fully disclose all of their private details.
You want Medicaid? Tell everyone about your hemorrhoids first.
Does that include those working for a company that gets tax breaks?
Might actually be a net benefit and lead to de-stigmatizing human health conditions
You go first, then. Let’s see your full medical records without redaction if you think it’s a net benefit.
I think there's value in reducing stigma around health conditions, but forcing poor people to reveal their medical conditions to the world isn't it.
I'm genuinely fine sharing my medical history, but I don't know if my lack of shame about e.g. testicular torsion, or the way that I lost my notes for a bit and unnecessarily got repeats of vaccines I'd already had, are a sign of being in possession of a boring medical history, or an indication of an uncommonly diminished shame response.
Whatever it is, I am aware that my lack of concern here is something which makes me different from normal people. I don't really get why people in general are ashamed of their medical histories, but I nevertheless absolutely do support everyone's right to keep such secrets, because there's a few specific cases where the medical history reveals something socially damaging either in the present or with a risk of it becoming so in the future, the obvious example of which is an abortion given the US seems to be facing a loss of freedom in this regard.
(Perhaps most people have something socially damaging in their medical histories, and I've just not noticed because nobody says the thing?)
The "I have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work for security, and it doesn't work for health care records either.
You might not have anything to hide now, but you might in the future. Someone you are closest to gets murdered or into a horrific violent accident right in front of you. Despite your best efforts this gives you crippling PTSD and you are committed involuntarily for a 72 hour hold. Now your future employer (legally or not) runs a quick records check and sees you have mental health concerns and really doesn't care about the context. Why roll the dice? Go with the candidate who was in a close 2nd and already a coin flip who doesn't have such a thing in their history.
Plenty of other scenarios that can happen to anyone even if they live the most perfect boring life imaginable and never do anything interesting ever. Plenty more for folks who step off the reservation of "acceptable social/corporate behavior" even a little bit.
Plus, if you want to protect folks like in your example of having an abortion on their record - you need to vehemently defend their right as a boring person yourself as that's the only way such individuals will ever be protected. It's like herd immunity but for privacy.
It's not about the people who have nothing to hide. It's about the people who do.
I don't know about 'a few specific cases'. STIs, mental health issues, pregnancies (interrupted or not, voluntarily or not), contraception methods and/or lapses, anything often misunderstood like MS or neurodegenerative diseases, huntington, substance use/abuse (voluntary or not), victim of assault (sexual or not), sterility/fertility/impotency/incontinence, any manageable medical issue someone might use to not give you a job, to rent you an apartment, although you do actually manage it well...
None of those I'd want shared anywhere, to anyone, against my will. Those (overall) are not rare.
This is not honestly engaging with GP's statement.
The benefit only accrues if the sharing is universal.
I am too private a person to agree with GP, but it does seem that most health issues that are visible to the passerby or casual acquaintence are less stigmatized than the ones that can be hidden. There might be something to the idea.
Of course you'd have to agree that de-stigmatizing is more socially important than privacy. I guess I'm privileged enough to have no stigmas, secret or otherwise, that I consider more important than my privacy. But I know others are less fortunate.
> The benefit only accrues if the sharing is universal.
The GP's statement wasn't for universal sharing. It was to force recipients of taxpayer money to share their medical records.
It's a gross demand: Force poor and old people to reveal their medical conditions to the world.
I was taking about everyone, so you are over confidently incorrect.
GP did not specify that their thought was scoped to the same people as GGP's (explicitly dystopian) scenario, so I read their comment as working on the kernel of the idea and not the horrifying class-based discriminatory version.
While I am still confident of that assessment, I'll grant you that "obvious" charitable interpretation is not as reliable as it should be. :-/
Exposing STDs and mental conditions is part of what HIPAA’s for. Putting everyone in glass houses just creates a massive panopticon.
By forcing the poorest to disclose their personal health issues?
What difference would this make to you? It would unnecessarily violate someone’s medical privacy for no actual benefit to the public other than satisfying someone’s curiosity.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
Yes, everyone gets privacy. You don’t get to see their private communications back home. You don’t get their medical records.
They aren’t receiving money from taxpayers like a gift. They’re doing a job. It’s ridiculous to demand that they forfeit their privacy because tax money was involved.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
NASA will learn what went wrong here because they’re in a position to act on
You are not in a position to do anything about it. Violating their privacy would make no difference.
Demanding every intimate personal detail of a human whose paycheck you happen to underwrite feels a little ... inhumane.
Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide),
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770023791 ("The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: Medical report" (1977))
Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.
Especially since every movement up and down from space is expensive and risks the life of the crew, it'd be a bad idea for NASA to name the astronaut ahead of time.
Disagree; this is completely taxpayer funded and we deserve to know every detail relevant to mission status. In this scenario knowing what illness and why it's grounds for a return is very relevant. That said, I can see NASA delaying information release to figure out a good strategy for it while still respecting any wishes of the sick astronaut with regards to disclosure.
The school is tax-payer funded, but I don't get to know why every teacher called out sick.
Government employees, contractors, etc. don't owe your curiousity satiety. We are buying their service, not their soul.
The CIA is also taxpayer funded. Do you have similar expectations of transparency into their missions?
I can respect operational security requirements. Even though they are abused.
What a strange take. Does this also apply to every soldier in the armed forces? Seems your criteria is equally applicable there.
The relevant people that can do the research and write future policies based on the data obviously will have the information. Not sure what good you think that you personally having it can do.
A single soldier having a medical issue generally doesn't cancel a multi-month mission costing some X large sum of money, requiring another Y large sum of money to even finish cancelling it (returning their unit home).
Therefore it's not relevant and not needed for the public to know.
Yes, I’m sure aircrew never get so violently sick as to affect millions or billions of dollars in crew and and supporting assets due to an emergency, and armed service members are never transported by emergency transportations for eye-watering costs. Technical inequity that ignores facts is the argument of those without arguments.
The specifics of “who” has zero relevance to what is necessary for an ongoing situation; you don’t get to dictate your access and timeline to information just because you contributed a fraction of a penny to something.
It could for anything remotely “special ops” - those are small specialized teams.
What are you going to do with this information? What policy would you plausibly advocate for on the basis of it?
These are free people (who happen to have a job that involves a space program). They have the same rights to [try to] keep their medical concerns private as you and I do.
It does cost a lot of money to keep their jobs going, but: They're not slaves. We do not own these people.
Yes, but at the same time I think NASA has long earned the trust to decide these things. Regardless of the issue, nobody wants their health issues aired to the entire world. I am personally okay just not knowing the intimate details.
People in general expect privacy when it comes to medical issues.
I think it’s possible to be sufficiently transparent while simultaneously keeping someone’s personal health status private.
As a hypothetical example, it’s possible to disclose if this health issue was known before they were selected for the mission, and if it was, what processes were in place to determine if they should or should not go, etc, all without revealing personal health information.
May be it would be better to have a full diagnosis after splashdown?
When I say I want full transparency, I usually am talking about how much pay they received and in the case of elected representatives, their net worth at least once a year.
I wouldn't ask for a full health report to be made public by law. Maybe a summary for elected officials.
Why do you need to know how much they are paid and their net worth? What difference does it make to you? Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well.
Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?
Perhaps you should chill and wait until they land before you start with your ridiculous paranoid thinking and entitlement?
The only medical condition I can think of which they would not disclose is pregnancy. That would lead to further questions and is controversial despite being very simple. Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
That alone is enough reason to have a policy of never disclosing medical conditions.
> Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
Nope. On a previous mission one of the crew members had to sped a night in hospital after touchdown. They never said who, or what for. This is standard procedure, and for good reason.