Among the most dreaded people at NASA are the folks known as the simsups. Simsup is short for simulation supervisor and the people who hold that job are the ones who devise and conduct elaborate—and harrowing—flight simulations, putting both engineers in Mission Control and astronauts in simulators through make-believe breakdowns and emergencies to test their moxie and mettle and prepare them for crises during real missions. Simulations are no easy thing, and in his fine autobiography, Flight: My Life in Mission Control, Chris Kraft, the original Director of Flight Crew Operations during the earliest days of the space program, evocatively described controllers at their consoles sweating real sweat as they fought to save astronauts from a make-believe crisis that felt every bit the real deal.
AS NPR reports, yesterday, June 12, there was a lot more sweating going as space followers listening in to the air-to-ground traffic between Houston and the International Space Station (ISS) on NASA’s website heard the alarming call that an astronaut was suffering from “DCS,” or decompression sickness. DCS is a very real risk on the ISS, which is filled with air at a sea level pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch, keeping astronauts safe from the vacuum outside. There is no shortage of seams and fittings aboard the station, any one of which could spring a leak and threaten the lives of the crew aboard. Since 2019, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, have been monitoring a very slow leak aboard the Russian Zvezda module, which has never proved life-threatening, but has defied efforts at a fix nonetheless.
The announcement about a DCS emergency put the Zvezda leak front of mind for listeners on the NASA loop, but ISS officials quickly sounded the all-clear, announcing on X, formerly Twitter, that the call was just the work of the simsups, the controllers, and an astronaut crew training at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., who were running a…
