NASA Unexpectedly Loses Contact With ISS

The International Space Station (ISS) was left without a way to communicate with NASA temporarily on Tuesday after a power outage struck ground control.

NASA's Mission Control in Houston, Texas, experienced a power blackout for around 90 minutes at 8 a.m. local time, briefly losing communications with the ISS's astronauts, forcing them to use backup power systems in order to re-establish contact.

The astronauts aboard the ISS, part of Expedition 69, were thankfully not in any danger during this period, a NASA spokesperson said, as they found a way to communicate using Russian communication systems within 20 minutes of the failure.

"We were able to talk to the crew through Russian assets about 20 minutes after the failure," Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, The Guardian reported. "That hardware was ready to go. Within about 90 minutes, we were up and running with full command, telemetry and voice to the International Space Station."

The outage was a result of upgrades to the Johnson Space Center ground power system and caused telemetry, voice communication, and command to be unexpectedly lost.

"We have been doing some upgrades...to add some reliability to our power systems. We lost the power, the telemetry, the command and the voice to the International Space Station," Montalbano said. "We knew this work was going on, and in preparation for that we have a backup command and control system that we would use if we have to close the center for weather emergency—especially important during the hurricane season."

"It wasn't an issue on board. That was purely a ground problem,"

This marks the first time since the ISS became fully operational in 2009 that it lost contact with ground control. The Expedition 69 crew, currently on the ISS, is comprised of NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Woody Hoburg, and Stephen Bowen, Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin, Andrey Fedyaev, and Commander Sergey Prokopyev, and UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi.

"Again, no impact to the safety of the crew or the safety of the vehicle, and we'll better understand what happened and then take lessons learned and move forward," Montalbano said.

The power systems were expected to be "up to a nominal configuration" by the end of Tuesday, and NASA plans to investigate the issue fully.

The incident comes less than a month before SpaceX's upcoming Crew-7 mission plans to send four astronauts to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The Falcon 9 rocket launching the capsule will take off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on August 17.

The ISS itself is nearing the end of its tenure, with NASA planning to deorbit the station by 2031, sending it plunging into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

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