When you have an emergency up in space, you're kinda forced to deal with it on your own, given that your hundreds of miles away from civilization.
You could still try calling for help of course, but the response time might not be the greatest up in orbit.
Images courtesy: NASA
Dutch astronaut Andr¨¦ Kuipers didn't need to be taught that, but he accidentally tested it out anyway. In a recent interview with Dutch public broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), he described an incident where he'd accidentally dialed the 911 US emergency services number while in orbit on the space station.
Kuipers is an astronaut with the European Space Agency, and was on board the ISS around 2006. "If you're in space, it's like you're making a call via Houston, first you dial the 9 for an outside line, and then 011 for an international line," Kuipers told NOS.
Unfortunately, Kuipers once forgot the zero in that series, and accidentally ended up dialling emergency services. Of course, that set off a panic at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and a security team had to rush to where the call had been placed.
Of course, they later realised there was really nothing wrong. "The next day I received an email message: did you call 911?" Kuipers said. He did say he was a little disappointed that no one had show up to check on his call.
"I was a little disappointed that they had not come up," he said.
It's not the only time astronauts on board have dialled wrong though. Back in 2015, British astronaut Tim Peake tweeted an apology to a woman he accidentally called. "I'd like to apologise to the lady I just called by mistake saying 'Hello, is this planet Earth?'" he said. "Not a prank call...just a wrong number!"