MADRID, June 13. (EUROPA PRESS) –
NASA has assured that “There is no emergency situation on board the International Space Station” after the inadvertent broadcast of an audio about a medical alert drill.
“At approximately 22:28 UTC (June 12) an audio was broadcast on NASA’s live broadcast from a ground simulation audio channel which indicated that a crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression sickness (DCS). This audio was inadvertently diverted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground crews They train for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real emergency,” NASA reported on its X account in response to news and reports on social media about an emergency situation in space.
In the simulation audio, which aired for about eight minutes on NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) live broadcast channels, a flight surgeon can be heard giving advice on how to treat an astronaut affected by decompression sickness. The specialist advises the Station crew to put the astronaut back in his spacesuit quickly and with pure oxygen, while also shares details of a hospital in Spain for emergency hypobaric treatment after returning to Earth with a splashdown in the ocean.
“Unfortunately, the forecast for the commander is pretty limited, I would say, to keep it generic,” the anonymous flight surgeon says in the simulation audio. He then said that he was still an hour away from Mission Control and stuck in a traffic jam.
Decompression sickness is a very real danger for astronauts in space, as they live in a pressurized habitat surrounded by the harsh airless environment of space. During spacewalks, astronauts in pressurized spacesuits exit the ISS by depressurizing its airlock and opening an exterior hatch. They reenter by closing the hatch behind them, repressurizing the airlock, and opening an interior hatch once they reach equilibrium. Only then do they take off their spacesuits, Space.com reports.
NASA emphasizes that at no time was any part of the simulation real, nor was the current ISS crew part of the medical simulation. The crew, which includes three Russian cosmonauts and six NASA astronauts, two of whom arrived last week on Boeing’s first crewed Starliner spacecraft, I wasn’t even awake NASA said.
