Space station ’emergency’ turns out to be a false alarm

AAmong the most feared people at NASA are those known as simsups. Simsup is short for simulation supervisor, and the people who fill this role are those who plan and conduct elaborate – and harrowing – flight simulations by putting engineers in mission control and astronauts in simulators through make-believe breakdowns and emergencies to test. their courage and courage and prepare them for crises during real missions. Simulations are not easy and in his beautiful autobiography Flight: My Life in Mission ControlChris Kraft, the original Flight Crew Operations Director during the early days of the space program, evocatively described the controllers on their consoles actually sweating as they fought to save the astronauts from a make-believe crisis that seemed entirely real.

AS NPR reportsyesterday, June 12, there was a lot more sweat as space followers listened to the air-to-ground traffic between Houston and the International Space Station (ISS) on the NASA website I heard the alarming call that an astronaut was suffering from “DDS,” or decompression sickness. DCS is a very real risk on the ISS, which is full of air. pressure at sea level of 14.7 pounds per square inch, keeping astronauts protected from the external vacuum. There is no shortage of seams and fittings aboard the station, any of which could cause a leak and threaten the lives of the crew on board. Since 2019NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, have been monitoring a very slow leak aboard the Russian Zvezda module, which never turned out to be life-threatening but nevertheless defied efforts for a solution.

The announcement about a DCS emergency put the Zvezda leak on the minds of NASA circuit listeners, but ISS officials quickly hinted that everything was fine, advertising on Xold Twitter, that the call was just the work of the simsups, the controllers, and a crew of astronauts training at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, who were running a simulation and inadvertently crossed their transmissions with the air-to-ground line.

“There is no emergency situation aboard the International Space Station,” read post one crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression sickness (DD). 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. The crew members of the International Space Station were sleeping at that time. Everyone remains healthy and safe, and tomorrow’s spacewalk will begin at 8 a.m. EDT as planned.”

SpaceX too rushed a post. “This was just a test,” she said. “Crew training at Hawthorne is safe and sound, as is the Dragon spacecraft docked to the @spacial station.”

Space station activities are proceeding more or less as planned today, although the spacewalk, involving NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matt Dominick, has been postponed. As of 10:40 a.m. EDT, NASA had not announced the cause of the postponement, but the errant DCS “emergency” does not appear to have been the reason.