The astronaut whose medical issue necessitated the early ending of a mission and evacuation from the International Space Station still doesn’t know what caused his illness.

Mike Fincke was no stranger to space, having four missions under his belt, but it was his most recent one that went down in history, and still, he has no answers why he got ill.

Fincke said he was eating dinner and getting ready for a space walk on Jan. 7 when he said he couldn’t talk but had no pain that he can remember, The Associated Press reported.

His crewmates said he was in distress and requested help from the flight surgeons back on Earth.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said.

The retired Air Force colonel said the episode lasted about 20 minutes and felt fine after it cleared. He has felt fine since and never had a similar incident before his ISS mission.

He wasn’t choking, didn’t have a heart attack, but doctors are still trying to rule out anything else that could have happened and hit like “a very, very fast lightning bolt,” the AP reported.

Fincke said he cannot share more about what happened, so that other astronauts don’t feel their privacy would be compromised if something happens in the future, the AP reported.

There had been speculation whether it was Fincke or someone else who had fallen ill when NASA didn’t initially disclose who was sick. But Fincke identified himself last month.

The spacewalk was canceled. It would have been his 10th and crewmate Zena Cardman’s first. The pair, along with two other crewmates, came back on Jan. 15, a month before the planned end of their mission, leaving behind only three people on the ISS, CNN reported at the time.

Fincke still hopes to return to space one day.

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