NASA's regularly scheduled International Space Station live stream gave viewers a brief, unintentional scare last night. On June 12 at 6:28 PM EST, an unknown speaker appeared to direct ISS crew members to treat a commander who was suffering from severe decompression sickness and whose “prognosis… is relatively weak.”
“Check his pulse again,” the person, likely a mission control flight surgeon, reportedly instructed during the broadcast according to NBC News.
The person also advised astronauts to place their critically ill colleague in a space suit supplied with pure oxygen to provide “best effort treatment,” and even suggested the possibility of ordering an emergency evacuation to get the commander to a hospital in Spain. including hyperbaric treatment facilities.
Decompression sickness, colloquially called “the bends,” is most often experienced by divers who transition too quickly between low- and high-pressure water depths, although extreme versions can occur in space if a spacecraft's external pressure does not exist. In these situations, nitrogen bubbles form in the body's arteries and blood vessels, blocking the flow of oxygen, nutrients and blood. If treated in time, the worst symptoms a patient can experience are severe joint cramps. However, if you depressurize too quickly, the problem is almost immediately fatal due to brain hemorrhages – as was unfortunately the case for three Russian cosmonauts aboard the Salyut-1 capsule in 1971.
[Related: NASA astronauts will scrape microorganisms off ISS during upcoming spacewalk.]
Knowing the seriousness of such situations, it took almost an hour and a half last night for concerned viewers to breathe a sigh of relief. At 8:05 PM EST, NASA has issued a statement about X confirming that the audio was “inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation in which crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real-world emergency… all remain healthy and safe.” According to NASA, there was a good chance that most ISS astronauts were actually asleep during the false alarm, as it occurred during the station's “sleep period.”
There is no emergency on board the International Space Station. At approximately 5:28 PM CDT, audio was broadcast on the NASA livestream from a ground-based simulation audio channel, indicating that a crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression…
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) June 13, 2024
It is currently unclear how the audio was accidentally piped into NASA's ISS livestream. Popular science has requested clarification and will update accordingly.
Unfortunately, last night's false alarm wasn't the last headache for the agency. Earlier this morning, NASA announced that the planned two-crew ISS spacewalk had to be postponed due to a (real) “space suit discomfort issue.”
