As sunrise broke across the eastern seaboard of the United States on August 10th, mission control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, was preparing for the day’s activities with the International Space Station (ISS). Little did they know that a power outage would disrupt the link between the two sites and send teams into a frantic recovery effort.
At approximately 5:30 AM, a power outage occurred at the Johnson Space Center, causing an interruption of communication between mission control and the ISS. According to officials, a product relay failed at a nearby power plant, which caused a cascade of related failures throughout the grid. This resulted in a total loss of power to the center and its mission operations.
Thankfully the backup power system at the center was able to kick in and restore enough power to keep systems running. Nonetheless, vital communication links were still disrupted and the mission control team scrambled to bring their systems back online.
After several hours of hard work, the team was finally able to reestablish links between mission control and the ISS and communication resumed as usual. However, due to the lack of communication through the mission control systems, the astronauts aboard the ISS had to use their own back-up systems to get by during the duration of the outage.
While the power outage disrupted communication between mission control and the ISS, it was thankfully resolved quickly without any major issues. This is a testament to the hard work of the mission control team and their ability to promptly handle any problem that arises with the link to the ISS.
Despite the temporary setback of the interruption of communications between the ISS and mission control, all routine operations on the ISS carried on as usual. Additionally, various experiments carried out by the crew were only slightly delayed and are now back on course.
The power outage at the Johnson Space Center was a temporary disruption that could have resulted in much worse issues had it not been for the hard work of the team at mission control. The staff there will now use this outage as a chance to further develop their back-up systems and systems protocols, ensuring that a similar situation can be avoided in the future.
