A worsening air leak aboard the International Space Station prompted five astronauts to take shelter and prepare for evacuation for roughly two hours on Friday as Russia attempted to fix a crack on its portion of the orbital laboratory. The four astronauts of NASA’s Crew-12 mission, two Americans, a French astronaut, and a Russian cosmonaut, along with another United States astronaut, were ordered by NASA mission control at 9:04 AM Eastern Time on Friday to enter their SpaceX-built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station. 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 International Space Station, the 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 station 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, with Roscosmos adding that there was no threat to the spacecraft’s systems.
The air leaks had been relatively minor in recent months but escalated on Friday from one pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named. The station is currently home to seven astronauts from two missions, including the Crew-12 team comprising 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 United States 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, were planning to use a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air.
NASA officials disagreed with this repair method, prompting mission control in Houston to issue the safe-haven order directing the other crew members into the Crew Dragon capsule. NASA reversed the safe-haven order and told astronauts they could return to the station once Roscosmos paused its repair efforts. NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said the agency looked forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks. Safe-haven orders are rare on the station, though pieces of space debris and smaller changes in air leak rates have triggered the process in recent years. Astronauts have never had to fully evacuate the station in its 27-year history.
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