the essential
NASA’s live broadcast was temporarily interrupted during the night of June 12 to 13, 2024, broadcasting a worrying message, a sign that a serious decompression accident had occurred on board the ISS. This audio was actually from a simulation exercise, and broadcast on the wrong channel.
Were the nine members of the crew of the ISS (the International Space Station) in serious danger during the night from Wednesday to Thursday? This is the shared fear of thousands of Internet users who heard a terrifying message on NASA’s direct channel, explains Numerama.
Against the background of a still image instead of the cameras that usually film the outside of the station, the voice of a flight doctor asks the staff to “put the commander back in his suit” and provide him with oxygen, his prognosis being “fragile”. The answers from his interlocutor are not audible, but we can easily imagine that they are not reassuring.
This disaster scenario was broadcast massively on social networks, going so far as to worry the military, who are nevertheless experienced in this type of simulation.
ud83dudea8Update: ISS medical emergency! Very strange and disturbing, audio just aired on the ISS Youtube feed. A flight surgeon for SpaceX? (she referenced being on the way to MCC-X but was stuck in traffic) was talking to someone about getting the “Commander” into his space suit,… pic.twitter.com/GUyR3iJHlY
— US Civil Defense News (@CaptCoronado) https://twitter.com/CaptCoronado/status/1801042190430273913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Eight minutes of terror
The broadcast of the message raising fears of the worst lasts eight long minutes. However, no disaster occurred in the ship orbiting 400 kilometers above our heads. “This audio was inadvertently diverted from an ongoing simulation in which crew members and ground teams are training for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real emergency,” explains a Tweet from the American space agency.
There is no emergency situation going on aboard the International Space Station. At approximately 5:28 pm CDT, audio was aired on the NASA livestream from a simulation audio channel on the ground indicating a crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression…
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) https://twitter.com/Space_Station/status/1801043194253127963?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
At the time the message was broadcast, the crew members were all resting, in order to be ready for an extra-vehicular spacewalk which is to be carried out this Friday.
