Mike Fincke was having dinner on the International Space Station when, out of nowhere, he lost the ability to speak.
It was January 7, 2026, the night before a spacewalk. For 20 minutes, the retired Air Force colonel and astronaut with 30 years at NASA could not utter a word. Doctors ruled out a heart attack, he ruled out choking, and minutes later he was speaking again as if nothing had happened. It was enough to trigger the first emergency medical evacuation in the ISS’s 25-year history: they brought him back to Earth ahead of schedule, in the middle of SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission.
With 549 cumulative days in space and 9 spacewalks to his name, Fincke retired from NASA last week. He leaves with a career admired by Administrator Jared Isaacman himself, but also with a question no one has been able to answer: what microgravity did to his brain that night in orbit.
