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An Astronaut Accidentally Called 911 from Space
- Finnucane 8y agoSomething 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.
- ltc5505 8y agoGrowing up I had a SO whose phone number had the pattern: XXX-XX9-11XX. I also had a hidden landline in my room for when my parents would take my phone at night. One night, around 2AM, my call redirected to an emergency dispatcher as if I had dialed 911, and I promptly hung up the phone (out of fear). When I redialed the number I was again redirected, and such a conversation ensued: ME: Sorry, my phone seems to be redirecting my calls. I apologize for disruption. Please don't dispatch an officer to my home. DISPATCHER: We are definitely sending over an officer. ME: Please don't. I'm going to get in a lot of trouble. DISPATCHER: ... Okay, now the officer is going to check your home and verify with each member of the family that everything is alright. My parents were not pleased to be woken up by a police officer at 2AM to check if they were okay. I got in a lot of trouble. I then called my ISP and had them add the troubled phone number to a list of non-redirecting numbers. I believe the cell number I was calling was issued before ISPs started redirecting numbers with 911 to emergency dispatch. The redirection of my call was probably a result of my ISP implementing the redirection.
- blastofrocks 8y agoWait what , any number with 911 will be redirected ? Does that for a 10 digit phone number out of 10! all possibilities, 8! are gone ? Can there only be 3588480(10! - 8!) safe phone numbers ever ?
- drfuchs 8y agoNope. It’s fine to have the substring “911” in your phone number. This guy must have experienced a hiccup in the system somewhere. What I want to know is how he managed to get a secret landline installed in his parents’ house.
- pimlottc 8y ago> What I want to know is how he managed to get a secret landline installed in his parents’ house. I'm assuming the poster had a secret extension to the existing landline, not an entirely separate line.
- rtkwe 8y agoOr they just had a spare phone they plugged into the socket their parents didn't know about (the phone not the socket). I'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already.
- ltc5505 8y agoYou're exactly correct. There was a hidden RJ11 socket behind my bed that I plugged a previously-forgotten phone into. There was only one line shared throughout the house, which occasionally caused some problems with my _master plan_.
- reaperducer 8y agoI'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already. I wouldn't. This is how the nerdier of my friends got their computers online in the 80's. In early modem days, a lot of people bought modems without thinking the whole process through. Once they got it home, they realized that either the room with the computer didn't have a phone line, the phone jack was inconveniently located, or after spending $300 on a 150-300 baud modem, they didn't realize they'd have to spend another $200 on a phone line + $50/month for the jack + $xx for dialtone. Splicing phone lines and fishing them through the walls with a coat hangar became an art. And if it wasn't practical in your house, you sometimes ran a phone line through the trees to your buddy's house. It was all very educational.
- kgwxd 8y agoIn about 2003 I had a rotary phone. My girlfriend tried to call her friend who's number started with 912. She didn't turn the 2 all the way. She hung up when the cops answered. That prompted an immediate callback and a pop-over shortly after.
- reaperducer 8y agoIn about 2003 I had a rotary phone I still have rotary phones in my house. Powderpuff blue in the kitchen. Black in my office. Goldenrod in the bedroom. The local telco doesn't support pulse dialing anymore, but there's a guy in Australia who make a little line-powered box that translates pulses into DTMF. It even does * and #, but I forget how.
- lostlogin 8y agoIf you choose a rotary phone, do you still curse people with 8s and 9s in their number as you dial?
- reaperducer 8y agoIf you choose a rotary phone, do you still curse people with 8s and 9s in their number as you dial? Yes. But mostly on the office phone because it slides around if I dial the numbers oriented toward the left side. Telcos used to intentionally give people low digits to keep dialing short. The abandoning of that notion is palpable when dialing rotary today. I wonder which actually used NANPA number is the longest to dial rotary under the current scheme.
- __m 8y agoWhen you choose a rotary phone you probably enjoy dialing those
- ergothus 8y ago> 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 That SHOULD be surprising, but the real surprise to me is that I had never thought about it being hard. We live in age with enough wonders that I take them for granted. I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing. I suspect that is because you mix up two different things: the wonders, and human nature. The wonders are amazing. That it is human nature to normalize to the point of taking them for granted might appear depressing. On the other hand, almost everything that we have normalized is mind-blowing and non-obvious when you think about it for long enough. So normalization is also a necessary coping mechanism to get stuff done.
- colechristensen 8y agoIn other words, society wouldn't have progressed much if seeing fire awestruck you every time you saw it.
- antognini 8y agoLow Earth orbit isn't really that far away. The ISS is only about a four hour's drive away, if only your car could drive straight up.
- janzer 8y agoWell, you could drive straight up for the 4 hours just so you could wave as it passed you going 70+ times faster than a formula one race car. Alternatively after the drive you can have the worst car accident in history.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoActually, given that, why does the call have so much latency?
- dghughes 8y agoIt's rather apt to be an astronaut with the last name Kuipers.
- joejerryronnie 8y agoWhat if he prefers suspenders?
- lucb1e 8y agoDutch here. Other than kuip as in badkuip or a ship's kuip, I don't see what it refers to. Does it mean anything funny in the context of space?
- gregmac 8y ago> to reach the center in Houston, orbiting astronauts have to dial 9 for an outside line, followed by 011 for an international line > 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. 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 through Houston). 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. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_the_area_code_for_the_international_space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_t...
- rtkwe 8y agoThey might just provide the numbers with the 011 included at the front so no one has to remember if they need to dial the extension. Makes sense given the astronauts travel all over the world doing training before launch so they've probably dialed the number with the extension at least as much as dialing the bare number, also note this was a Dutch astronaut so he probably learned the number including the 011.
- isostatic 8y agoOnly North America use 011 for international lines. ITU recommendation is 00, Russia use 810 if I recall correctly
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
- Amorymeltzer 8y ago>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. 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.
- nolok 8y agoSorry for the useless nitpick but it's not so much about working place per se but rather about internal switchboard; although it usually is linked. I once rented a place here in France that was a former student building, while it was a normal apartment renting on paper/legally/technically, I still had to dial a number to reach the outside world. Fun times when your old neighbor transfer calls to you without wanting to.
- topbanana 8y agoThat reminds me. In our student building there was an intercom on each building, and 7 or 8 students would share each apartment. I noticed that it would quietly dial the internal number for that apartment. Sure enough, dialing 9 with a DTMF tone generator would get an outside line :)
- closeparen 8y agoUse that to dial your own cell phone, then press any key on your cell phone to unlock the door.
- derefr 8y agoIt's kind of silly; you can very easily set a PBX into a mode where any registered user handset will dial out by default, and can't use the PBX features like forwarding (but circuits created by the PBX's internal logic still can, so you don't lose features like ring pools for font-gate access.)
- SonnyWortzik 8y agoHere is how I pictured it going. > operator: "911 what is your emergency?" > "...........Hello, I need assistance??" > operator "Sir, Sir. Do you need help?" > "........... YES I am here, Who is this? ......." > operator: "Sir, we began tracing your call and are on the way.... wait... Sir what is your current location" > "uuuummmmmm.... well about 2000 km up..... Sorry dialed the wrong number..." hung up > operator: ".....???" isn't day dreaming fun? LOL
- foo101 8y agoPlease don't do this here. Comments like this degrade the reading experience on HN. This is why you are getting downvoted. The HN crowd generally prefers more substantive comments and discourages low effort humor.
- glaberficken 8y agoPlease read the last paragraph in the HN guidelines page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SonnyWortzik 8y agoThis is in good fun. What is wrong? I mean the original post is not really a Scientific Journal article. It was posted for fun. So lets have fun once in a while.
- dang 8y agoHumor's fine but the bar is high. Low-quality humor grows like crabgrass or kudzu and soon takes over. People are vigilant about not letting that happen here, not because they don't like fun, but because they've seen it happen elsewhere on the internet. Most people overestimate how funny their comments are. scott_s said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
- lostlogin 8y ago
- sremani 8y agoReminds me of how Indian graduate students from New Delhi accidentally call 911 because India code is 91 and Delhi area code is 11.
- iambateman 8y agoWhy would there be a lag in the call? I don’t think other satellite phones have much perceivable delay. So the question is...do astronauts get 10 spam calls per day like the rest of us?
- Sharlin 8y agoThey use IP telephony, bounced through geosynchronous satellites like their other Internet traffic. So the best-case signal roundtrip is already close to 150000 km. I'm not sure whether standard satellite phones would work on the ISS. BTW, is the spamcall/robocall thing a US phenomenon? I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking about those except Americans. I only get regular human telemarketers every now and then, but I generally don't answer calls from unknown numbers anyway.
- ForHackernews 8y agoUK gets huge numbers of spam/scam calls: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/06/bt_call_scam/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/06/bt_call_scam/
- stordoff 8y agoThe UK gets a lot of spam calls, but most appear to be humans.
- altoidaltoid 8y ago911 is a joke in yo orbit
- empath75 8y agoMy 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. 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 .." "Sir, you need to call your phone provider, not emergency services." click
- acct1771 8y agoLong-press is the standard "alt use" of things on phones, these days.
- ccnafr 8y agoGravity plays tricks on your fingers.
- perlgeek 8y agoWe 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. But of course, this not being from space, it's not that news worthy :-)
- illegalsmile 8y agoSimilar situation here where you had to dial 9 then the number. Many employees with fast fingers who dialed long distance would find themselves accidentally double tapping the 1 and calling 911. After numerous emails and meetings they changed the dial out number to 8. No more incidents. Not news worth at all!
- thomnottom 8y agoThat brings back painful memories. 8+ years of dialing 9 to get an outside line and only 1 person had made that mistake (while trying to dial 411!) at a previous company. Then new management comes in and it happens twice in 2 days. Supposedly a huge fiasco and they started pushing to change the dial out digit immediately. Such a headache.
- mabbo 8y agoWhen we moved to a new town, when I was a kid, we learned that if a given number was free, you could request it as your phone number. But you had to know it was free by dialing it and getting a response saying so. My sister started trying memorable ones and tried [### - ### - 1234] (first 7 digits withheld for privacy reasons). That was the local fire department. 911 would have gone to the same phone. She hastily apologized. Later she learned that "4000" was free, and my parents have used that phone number for 20 years now.
- johan_larson 8y agoWell, at least he didn't try to order a pizza. "Jaa, I vaant too laage pies vit pepperuuni. Let me give yoo die oobital parametaas."
- coding123 8y agoDid they send out a car?
- Stratoscope 8y agoIn 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. After one bad rainstorm, our phone was unusable. If you picked up the handset you would just hear a bunch of clicks. 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. I told them no one had called 911 and we were fine. Then it dawned on me: the clicks! 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. Sure enough, with random clicks all day, the phone circuit had just happened to detect nine clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click.
- timthorn 8y agoThat's exactly why the UK emergency number was set as 999. Needing those extra clicks meant it was harder for random events to trigger a call.
- n4r9 8y agoWell, part of the reason. They wanted to use a number close to 0 so that it could be dialled on a rotary phone without requiring visibility. 111 was rejected for the reason of random events or faulty lines, 222 because it connected to Abbey's local exchange: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8675000/8675199.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/hist...
- bboreham 8y agoSomething missing from this story. If ‘9’ gets you an outside line, then you miss the ‘0’, the number seen by the telco starts ‘11...’ Maybe the pbx is programmed to recognise ‘911’ and dial that, without requiring an outside line?
- DKnoll 8y agoThe '9' prefix to reach an outside line likely corresponds to a specific outbound route that handles phone numbers matching a certain regex (generally length). Depending on how outbound routes were configured on the PBX a prefix might not be required for the outbound route set up with regex to match 911. I think this is often done as a safety feature, so somebody not knowing or forgetting the exit number can still dial 911 in an emergency and reach emergency services. I've seen PBXs set up this way in past.
- throw7 8y agoOur workplace had 9 for outside line and someone accidentally called 911. It was changed to 2 after that happened.
- disishhsha 8y agoI 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.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoOfftopic, 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?
- mr_toad 8y agoNot on the site itself, but I’m using an third-party-script blocker.
- luizfzs 8y agoI see you are a redditor as well.