SpaceX Crew-8 astronaut released from hospital, returns to Houston

[Admin]

The NASA astronaut who was hospitalized for a night after the splashdown of SpaceX's Crew-8 mission has been released and is doing well, according to the agency.

SpaceX Crew-8 astronaut released from hospital, returns to Houston : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

"agency officials said (in an emailed statement) would be the final one on this matter."

At least until the conspiracy theories get so outlandish that NASA feels compelled to provide some reality by divulging some actual information. By which time they will have no credibility of the subject.

As another poster observed in a previous thread, this secrecy does not seem necessary or rational.

 

[ChrisA]

My hope is that the astronaut in question simply tells us what went on.

But if he fails to do that, we the people who paid for ISS built it for a few reasons, one of them was to find out what happens to humans when exposed to space for long periods of time. So it seems that now we have found an outlier point and it would be best if the data were published. A peer-reviewed paper would be the best way to publish it.

Or we simply wait until the information leaks.

In the meantime we can guess. My guess is that so, someone stood up and got lightheaded and fell down because his veins were too weak to cause blood to flow from his feet back to the brain. Then after a day or so exposed to gravity, he recovered. yes, this is a guess. This can not be the only guess and most guesses will be wrong. Better for someone to set the record right before the space gets filled with guesses.

 

[billslugg]

Our HIPPA law precludes public sharing of medical data by medical providers. However, it may have been the person signed that right away in order to go up there in the first place. Just some rank speculation.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Actually, HIPPA only restrict medical personnel from divulging personal medical information about another individual. A non-medical observer could legally tell the news media everything he/she witnessed, even interpreting a visible electrocardiogram screen if it was visible to him/her.

NASA probably has some additional restrictions on what its employees and contractors can tell the media, which is probably the real issue, here.

But, I think that, as the taxpayers who pay for all of NASA, including the space station and the astronauts salaries, we are entitled to know what happened to an astronaut doing the work we paid for. Effectively, we are the real employers. So we need to know if our employees in NASA were negligent or if they discovered something that we need to know about as we decide how to proceed with putting humans into space.

This is not a "national security" issue, so the actual need for secrecy is not evident.

But, the way NASA is handling it provides real opportunity for malicious misinformation efforts intended to hurt our nation. That is a very real issue that does involve national security, as evidenced by the recent riots in various countries that were targeted with misinformation campaigns. For instance, see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2x3kr6lgo for an example of how this was done while the medical condition of the Princess of Wales was being withheld.