It sounded like a nightmare scenario: An astronaut commander on the International Space Station in distress, suffering from decompression sickness, and a flight surgeon on Earth stuck in traffic, giving advice broadcast live on NASA’s official live broadcast.
But while it seemed all too real, the script was actually audio from a simulation on Earth that somehow made it onto NASA’s public airwaves, sparking news and social media reports of the dire situation in space.
“There is no emergency aboard the International Space Station,” NASA officials confirmed in a statement on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday night (June 12) when the news first broke. “At approximately 5:28 p.m. CDT, sound from a simulation sound channel on the ground was broadcast on NASA’s live feed, indicating that a crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression sickness (DCS). This sound was inadvertently misdirected from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for different scenarios in space and not related to a real emergency.”
In the audio simulation, which ran for about eight minutes on NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) live feeds, a flight surgeon can be heard giving advice on how to treat an astronaut in the throes of decompression sickness. He advises rescuers to get the astronaut back into a spacesuit and on pure oxygen quickly, while sharing details of a hospital in Spain for emergency hypobaric treatment after returning to Earth with an ocean splash.
“Unfortunately the prognosis for the commander is rather poor, I would say to keep it general,” says the unnamed flight surgeon in the audio simulation. The flight surgeon then said he was still an hour away from mission control and stuck in traffic.
Decompression sickness is a very real danger for astronauts in space because they live in a pressurized environment surrounded by the harsh, airless environment of space. During spacewalks, astronauts in pressurized spacesuits exit the ISS by depressurizing its air chamber and opening the outer hatch. They re-enter by closing the hatch behind them, re-pressurizing the air chamber and opening the inner hatch once they have reached equilibrium. Only then do they take off their spacesuits.
NASA officials stressed that no part of the simulation was ever real, nor was the current ISS crew part of a medical exercise. The crew of three Russian cosmonauts and six NASA astronauts, two of whom arrived last week on Boeing’s first manned Starliner spacecraft, were not even awake, NASA said.
“The International Space Station crew members were asleep at the time,” NASA officials said in a statement.
The crew is gearing up for a busy spacewalk on Thursday (June 13). NASA astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Matthew Dominick are expected to spend more than six hours working outside the ISS to assemble a malfunctioning radio communication unit and collect swab samples from outside the station as part of a study on microorganisms in extreme space environments.
The spacewalk will begin at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), with NASA TV coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT). You can watch the spacewalk live on Space.com at launch time.
“Everyone remains healthy and safe, and tomorrow’s spacewalk will begin at 8 a.m. EDT as planned,” NASA officials said.