A commercial orbital habitat above Earth sends a distress pulse into communications paths leading toward terrestrial emergency-network points. Title: Lunar 911 — The Emergency Network Leaves Earth. Part One: Who Answers 911 in Space?

Lunar 911, Part 1: The Emergency Networks Leave Earth

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Before people can safely inhabit commercial space stations, we must decide how an emergency request reaches the right authority

By Mark J. Fletcher, ENP

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Most of us carry a simple assumption wherever we go: if something terrible happens, we can call 911.

That assumption follows us into a hotel, onto a college campus, down an unfamiliar highway and, increasingly, into places where a traditional cellular network may not exist. It is one reason satellite connectivity to ordinary mobile devices has attracted so much attention. The promise is not merely that we can send a message from a remote location. The real promise is that isolation no longer has to mean disconnection from help.

Now take that assumption a little higher.

What happens when the hotel is in Earth orbit? What happens when the workplace is a commercial space station, the vehicle is traveling between Earth and the Moon, or the person asking for help works for a different company than the organization operating the habitat?

Who answers 911 in space?

It sounds like a science-fiction question. It is not. We are already designing the habitats, transportation systems, communications networks and commercial services that will make sustained human activity beyond Earth possible. Public safety cannot be the last system added after everything else is operational.

The first serious emergency in a new environment should not be the event that teaches us an emergency communications architecture would have been useful.

Inside a commercial orbital habitat, residents, technical crew and a medical professional share a living-and-work module while Earth appears through a large window.

We Are Building Places to Live, Not Merely Vehicles to Visit

For most of the human spaceflight era, a spacecraft has been treated as a highly specialized vehicle supporting a tightly controlled mission. The people aboard are extensively trained. Ground teams continuously monitor the mission. Procedures anticipate fire, depressurization, medical emergencies, loss of communications and countless equipment failures. The crew members are not simply occupants. They are also the first responders.

That model works when the number of people is small, the mission is finite and one integrated organization controls most of the environment.

It becomes much more complicated when space becomes a destination.

NASA is preparing to transition from the International Space Station to commercially owned and operated destinations in low Earth orbit. The objective is an environment in which NASA becomes one customer among many, alongside other governments, researchers, manufacturers and private visitors. NASA is also working with international and commercial partners on Gateway, a station intended to operate in lunar orbit and support sustained exploration around and on the Moon.

Those developments represent more than a change in spacecraft ownership. They represent the early formation of communities.

A community contains people who work for different organizations, arrive with different levels of training, speak different languages, use different equipment and operate under different contracts. It may include government astronauts, commercial crews, scientists, technicians, medical personnel, tourists and people whose primary expertise has nothing to do with surviving a spacecraft emergency.

At that point, “call mission control” is no longer a complete public-safety plan.

Which mission control? Operated by whom? Responsible for which module, vehicle, customer or nation? What happens when two commercial stations dock, when a visitor moves between them, or when an emergency originates in one operator’s facility and threatens another?

The physical structure may be in orbit, but the organizational boundaries will look remarkably familiar to anyone who has tried to coordinate emergency response across municipal, county, state, carrier and private-enterprise lines.

A mission-control team monitors an orbital-habitat emergency while flight, medical and engineering personnel coordinate beneath telemetry and a small red alert.

Today, Mission Control Is the Closest Thing to an ECC

In the current model, mission-control personnel receive telemetry, monitor life-support systems, speak with the crew, consult specialists and coordinate decisions. Onboard alarms notify the crew of immediate hazards, and detailed procedures define how the crew responds.

Functionally, pieces of an emergency communications center already exist. They are distributed among onboard systems, mission controllers, flight surgeons, engineering specialists, recovery forces and partner agencies.

But this is not the same thing as a universally accessible emergency service.

A terrestrial 911 system is expected to accept an unscheduled request for help from an ordinary person. It must determine what happened, establish where it happened, identify the appropriate authority, route the information, dispatch capable resources and maintain communications as the incident develops. It must continue to work even when the caller does not know the correct agency, cannot describe the location or is using a different communications provider.

That last point will become critical in space. A person in distress should not need to understand which company owns the relay satellite, which organization operates the habitat or which ground station currently has visibility. The network should determine how to reach help.

Sound familiar?

That is precisely the problem emergency communications professionals have been solving on Earth for decades.

A low-Earth-orbit satellite carries an emergency communications path between a remote caller location and a terrestrial emergency communications center.

Public Safety Has Already Entered Orbit

The first bridge between terrestrial 911 and space communications is already being constructed.

The Federal Communications Commission created a Supplemental Coverage from Space framework that allows satellite operators and terrestrial wireless providers to collaborate in extending service beyond traditional coverage. The FCC’s interim public-safety requirements address satellite-carried 911 voice calls and text messages. Providers must use available device-location information to route the emergency communication to an appropriate PSAP, or use an emergency call center that can determine the caller’s location and direct the request appropriately.

That is an important regulatory precedent. The communications path may leave the terrestrial network, travel through a satellite and return somewhere else, but the obligation to connect the person with emergency assistance does not disappear merely because part of the journey occurred in space.

It also reveals the questions that will follow us into orbit:

  • What location information is available?
  • Who is responsible for routing the emergency?
  • What happens when the preferred path is unavailable?
  • Can the caller receive an acknowledgment and maintain two-way communications?
  • Which provider protects the emergency data?
  • Who documents performance and reports failures?

Initially, satellite 911 supplements public-safety infrastructure on Earth. Eventually, the emergency may originate aboard the satellite infrastructure—or inside a habitat that depends on it.

That is when the architecture must change from using space to reach a terrestrial PSAP to providing public-safety communications for people who live and work in space.

An orbital-habitat distress signal branches through mission control, a remote medical specialist and a nearby rescue spacecraft, showing the response required beyond connectivity.

A Communications Link Is Not an Emergency Service

One of the easiest mistakes will be declaring the problem solved because every habitat has a radio and an Internet connection.

Connectivity is necessary, but connectivity alone does not create emergency response. A complete service must be able to:

  1. Recognize or receive a request for help.
  2. Establish the identity and condition of the person or system reporting it.
  3. Determine an actionable location.
  4. Classify and prioritize the incident.
  5. Route it to the authority capable of making decisions.
  6. Notify and coordinate the resources capable of responding.
  7. Maintain communications and situational awareness.
  8. Document the incident and preserve the information required for investigation and improvement.

On Earth, we have separated many of those responsibilities among carriers, 911 authorities, ECCs, law enforcement, fire, emergency medical services, emergency management and private building operators.

In orbit, the same functions will still exist, even if the job titles and vehicles look very different.

The responding unit may be another crew member carrying breathing equipment. It may be a medical specialist appearing through telepresence, an autonomous robot, a rescue spacecraft launched from another station or a safe-room system activated remotely. The incident may involve fire, decompression, radiation exposure, a medical emergency, collision debris, loss of power, contaminated air or a cyberattack against life-support infrastructure.

The technology changes. The public-safety responsibility does not.

Commercial satellites and an orbital habitat share communications paths above Earth while regulators and engineers confer in a dim operations room.

Who Regulates the Network Above the Network?

The communications system will not exist outside regulation simply because it operates outside the atmosphere.

The International Telecommunication Union’s Radio Regulations govern the international use of radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbits. National administrations authorize and coordinate the systems under their jurisdiction. In the United States, the FCC licenses and regulates many satellite and Earth-station communications activities. These mechanisms address spectrum use, harmful interference, technical operation and coordination among systems.

Lunar communications are already entering that process. Resolution 680 from the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference calls for studies of possible new or modified spectrum allocations for communications on the lunar surface and between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. Those studies are expected to inform future international regulatory decisions.

Spectrum coordination, however, is not the same as public-safety governance.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty establishes that outer space and celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation. It also makes nations responsible for space activities conducted by their governmental and nongovernmental entities and establishes principles of assistance to astronauts in distress.

Those are essential foundations, but they do not tell an orbital resident which emergency service answers, which organization has incident command, what response capability must be available or which service-level standard applies.

Responsibility may initially follow the station operator, sponsoring nation, registered space object, contractual relationship or mission agreement. That could produce an emergency-services map in which two facilities operating beside one another use different networks, procedures and response authorities.

We already know what fragmented public-safety communications look like. We should avoid exporting the worst parts of that architecture into orbit.

A distress pulse from an orbital habitat is located and routed through a relay satellite to a ground emergency center and an approaching rescue spacecraft.

The Network Must Know Where Help Lives

The first orbital emergency system may not use the digits 9-1-1. It may begin with an alarm, wearable device, voice command, control-panel button or automated message from a life-safety system.

The method matters less than the promise behind it:

When someone asks for help, the network recognizes the request, establishes the person’s location, reaches the appropriate authority and identifies a capable response.

We are already learning how to deliver emergency calls through space. The next challenge is considerably larger: delivering emergency services to people who live there.

Next week, Part Two of Lunar 911: Who Answers 911 in Space? moves from Earth orbit to sustained habitation on the Moon. We will examine LunaNet, lunar search and rescue, dispatchable location without street addresses, mutual aid where no nation owns the ground and the eventual need for the first lunar emergency communications center.

Before we build that center, however, we must answer a deceptively simple question:

If an emergency occurs on the Moon, where does the call go—and who is actually close enough to respond?

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