NASA orders astronauts on evacuation alert as space station air leak worsens
A worsening air leak aboard the International Space Station prompted five astronauts to temporarily take shelter and prepare for evacuation on Friday as Russia attempted to fix a crack on its portion of the orbital laboratory, NASA said.
On Friday morning, NASA mission control instructed the four astronauts of its Crew‑12 mission — two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut — along with another U.S. astronaut to enter the SpaceX‑built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station and don their spacesuits, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.
NASA reversed that order roughly two hours later and told the astronauts they could return to the station as the agency and its Russian counterparts examined the rate of leaking air.
NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, the station’s two primary operators, have debated for months over the cause and potential fixes of small air leaks aboard Russia’s Zvezda service module, a key structure of the ISS, a football field-size orbital laboratory where astronauts live and work in space.
Roscosmos said on Friday that its experts had detected two leaks aboard the ISS but that there was no immediate threat to the crew. The first leak was quickly sealed, and preparations were underway to seal the second one, the agency said, adding that there was no threat to the spacecraft’s systems.
The air leaks have been relatively minor in recent months but were found to have escalated on Friday.
“The cracks have always been a concern that NASA watches very closely,” Stevens said in a statement.
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The ISS is currently home to seven astronauts from two missions, including the Crew‑12 team — NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — who arrived in February.
The other crew of one U.S. astronaut, Christopher Williams, and two cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, arrived in November.
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev, who did not execute evacuation procedures, had planned to use a saw to break into an area where they believe they can access the crack leaking air, a NASA spokesperson said. That effort brings a higher risk, which prompted mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures, the spokesperson added. In the end, however, Roscosmos paused the repair efforts as more measurements were taken.
“Given this development, NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station,” Stevens said. “We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks.”
Safe-haven orders are rare on the space station, though pieces of space debris that risk colliding with the ISS and smaller changes in air leak rates have triggered the process in recent years.
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