Four space station fliers have been told to cut their mission short and return to Earth ahead of schedule because of an apparently serious medical issue affecting an unidentified crew member, NASA announced Thursday.

The Propulsion and Structural Test Facility, also known as the T-tower, was built in 1957 by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and later transferred to NASA in 1960. At the Marshall Center, the tower was used to develop the Saturn launch vehicles.

A test model of the Perseverance rover, designed to explore the surface of Mars, sits in a garage at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Pasadena, California, in October. On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance,

On Monday, Congress made good on those promises, releasing a $24.4 billion budget plan for NASA as part of the conferencing process, when House and Senate lawmakers convene to hammer out a final budget. The result is a budget that calls for just a 1 percent cut in NASA’s science funding, to $7.25 billion, for fiscal year 2026.

NASA says it is continuing to prepare for a possible Artemis 2 launch as soon as February, but with remarkably little publicity for the historic mission.

NASA has spent the last few weeks getting ready for two spacewalks at the International Space Station (ISS), its first in eight months. But just hours before NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were due to begin the first of the two walks on Thursday,

Five American astronauts have 10 spacewalks under their belt to date: Bob Behnken, Stephen Bowen, Chris Cassidy, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Peggy Whitson. The world record is 16, held by cosmonaut Anatoly Solevyev.