An Astronaut Called 911 By Mistake While Orbiting In Space

All of us once call others unintentionally by sitting or pressing our phones while they are in our pocket.

Interestingly, an astronaut named André Kuipers has described how he called American Emergency Services by mistake while orbiting around the Earth and on the International Space Station in a new interview on the radio with Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, a public broadcaster.

According to the explanation of Kuipers, all phone calls which are made from the International Space Station go through the Johnson Space Center of NASA in Houston.

According to his words with NOS which were translated by Google Translate, while trying to contact NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, he missed the number 0 and accidentally called the United States emergency services. He should have dialed 9 for a line outside, followed by the numbers 011 for an international line. On the following day, he got an email message to ask whether he called 911 or not.

While the transfer of data from our planet Earth to the International Space Station is delayed for a more extended period of time than usual, phone calls in the long distance are still working normally for astronauts, according to Holly Ridings, Flight Director of NASA in an interview with Space Answers back in 2013. Due to the extremely long distance, the message has to be transferred from the Earth to the ISS with the help of a relay satellite. Of course, delay still happens, but under normal conditions, it does not last longer than a second.

As you see, astronauts can actually call the emergency service. However, in case that an emergency situation did happen, they would need to handle it by themselves since the Earth’s emergency services are extremely far away from them.