>The 60-year-old said that to reach the center in Houston, orbiting astronauts have to dial 9 for an outside line, followed by 011 for an international line.<p>I suppose it makes sense, but there is something jarring about someone in space having to dial 9 to get an outside line. I forget that, in some sense, the ISS is a workplace, and while the view is fantastic it still isn't immune from some of the banality plaguing the rest of humanity.
In the mid-1990s I lived in a San Jose neighborhood with underground utilities. Sometimes water would get into the phone lines and cause short circuits.<p>After one bad rainstorm, our phone was unusable. If you picked up the handset you would just hear a bunch of clicks.<p>Then two police officers knocked on the door. They said someone had called 911 from my number, they called back and no one answered, so they were required to come out and investigate.<p>I told them no one had called 911 and we were fine. Then it dawned on me: the clicks!<p>I invited them in so they could listen to the phone, and explained how old rotary dial phones work: by opening and closing the circuit once to dial a 1, twice for 2, etc. And the phone system still supported rotary dial phones.<p>Sure enough, with random clicks all day, the phone circuit had just happened to detect nine clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click.
> to reach the center in Houston, orbiting astronauts have to dial 9 for an outside line, followed by 011 for an international line<p>> His comms slip-up set off a security alert at the Houston center, he explained, with emergency staff to check the room where the space station’s line connected to Earth.<p>Dialing 9 and "outside lines" implies there's some sort of PBX system, which makes sense. What I don't get though, is if the outside lines are in Houston, why do you have to dial the international access code 011 to call Houston? I thought maybe there was a country code allocated to the ISS, but according to a Reddit thread, they just use Houston numbers [1]. I think the first bit from the article is just a mistake (eg he wasn't calling a Houston number, just <i>through</i> Houston).<p>Aside, it's amazing how many (new) PBXs still use the "dial 9" requirement. If you dial a 10 digit number (in North America), it's obviously destined for an outside line. If you avoid assigning extensions that conflict with area codes, you can even use early dialing (where the call is placed as soon as a number pattern is recognized), but that's optional as the system will just wait a few seconds to see if you're dialing more digits or not. Already anyone with an extension that starts with the local area code probably already gets lots of misdialed calls since people forget to dial 9 all the time.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_the_area_code_for_the_international_space/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_t...</a>
> it is surprisingly easy to communicate with the Earth while aboard a space station in orbit. He suggested astronauts can reach terrestrial phones via satellites around 70 percent of the time<p>That SHOULD be surprising, but the real surprise to me is that I had never thought about it being hard.<p>We live in age with enough wonders that I take them for granted. I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing.
We had similar things happen at a previous $work, where you needed 09 to dial out, but one of the largest cities closed by had the prefix "0911". Here in Germany, our emergency lines are 110 and 112, so if you called any "0911 2<something>" number, and forgot to add the 09 prefix, you'd be calling the fire department.<p>But of course, this not being from space, it's not that news worthy :-)
Why would there be a lag in the call? I don’t think other satellite phones have much perceivable delay.<p>So the question is...do astronauts get 10 spam calls per day like the rest of us?
Something similar happened to a friend of mine in a hotel back in the days of dial-up. His laptop dialer was hiccuping, and instead of dialing 9-1-(access number) was dialing 99-11-(access number). After a couple of tries, a couple of cops showed up at the room wondering what was going on.
My screen stopped working on my iphone a few weeks ago, and I was trying to get it to reset to see if it fixes it, and I hit the side button 5 times, triggering the call to 911.<p>When they answered, I said something like. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call, my phone screen stopped working and i was trying to reset it and .."<p>"Sir, you need to call your phone provider, not emergency services." <i>click</i>
Something missing from this story.<p>If ‘9’ gets you an outside line, then you miss the ‘0’, the number seen by the telco starts ‘11...’<p>Maybe the pbx is programmed to recognise ‘911’ and dial that, without requiring an outside line?
Here is how I pictured it going.<p>> operator: "911 what is your emergency?"<p>> "...........Hello, I need assistance??"<p>> operator "Sir, Sir. Do you need help?"<p>> "........... YES I am here, Who is this? ......."<p>> operator: "Sir, we began tracing your call and are on the way.... wait... Sir what is your current location"<p>> "uuuummmmmm.... well about 2000 km up..... Sorry dialed the wrong number..." <i>hung up</i><p>> operator: ".....???"<p>isn't day dreaming fun? LOL
Offtopic, but is there some malware on this website? First I was rather annoyed because there was an autoplaying video that stayed at the top of the screen covering half of it, with only a very tiny x at the top right to close it. After that chrome asked me if I want to allow the site to show notifications, but then chrome asked me to access my camera! Why on earth would a news site need access to my camera?
I worked for a unicorn startup. We got in trouble when our SDRs (entry-level salespeople who did cold calls all day) kept accidentally calling 911. Ultimately the solution was to reprogram the phone system to allow 7 as a prefix in addition to 9.