NASA has been forced to reassure the public that there is no emergency aboard the International Space Stationafter audio from a medical exercise was accidentally played on a live stream Wednesday night.
The regularly scheduled live broadcast was interrupted at 6:28 pm ET by an unidentified speaker – apparently a flight surgeon – contacting the ISS crew about how to deal with a commander suffering from severe compression illness.
The speaker advises the crew to “check his pulse one more time” before placing the injured astronaut inside a suit filled with pure oxygen. She says any action would be “the best treatment” and better than doing nothing.
“Unfortunately, the prognosis for Commander is relatively tenuous,” she says.
She says she is “concerned that there is some serious D.D. [decompression sickness] hits” and tells the crew to get him into the suit as quickly as possible.
She mentions that there is a hospital in San Fernando, Spain, with hyperbaric treatment facilities, in an apparent suggestion to order an emergency evacuation of the space station.
But after raising alarm bells among listening space enthusiasts, NASA revealed that the scenario wasn’t real – the ISS crew was all safely asleep at the time.
“There is no emergency situation aboard the International Space Station,” NASA said.
“At approximately 5:28 p.m. CDT, audio was broadcast on NASA’s live feed from a ground simulation audio channel indicating that a crew member was suffering effects related to decompression sickness,” the agency said. in a message on X.
“This audio was inadvertently diverted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space and is not related to an actual emergency,” NASA said.
“The International Space Station crew members were sleeping at the time. Everyone remains healthy and safe, and tomorrow’s spacewalk will begin at 8 a.m. EDT as planned,” he added.
Emergency exercise comes after two astronauts from Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked successfully with the ISS last week.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
