National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by Friday evening canceled the alert for American astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). They had previously been ordered to “take enhanced security measures” and hide inside the docked Crew Dragon while their Russian colleagues fixed an air leak at the station.
A spokeswoman for the American space agency, Bethany Stevens, said that “out of precaution,” four members of the Crew-12 mission and American Chris Williams, who had arrived at the ISS earlier, were ordered to take refuge in the spacecraft. Crew-12 includes Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European cosmonaut Sophie Adeno and Russian Andrei Fedyaev.
Other employees of the Russian state corporation Roscosmos were at the time trying to fix leaks in the Zvezda service module tunnel. According to Stevens, it has been suffering from cracks for some time, which is why this problem appeared.
“NASA and Roscosmos are working to determine the root cause of the cracks, and Roscosmos is addressing the problem through operational risk mitigation measures and periodic partial repairs,” Stevens said, adding that on Friday the Russian counterparts decided on “more extensive repairs.”
By evening, NASA instructed astronauts to “complete safety procedures” and “return to routine operations” aboard the International Space Station. The return of colleagues to the ISS was confirmed to RBC by Roscosmos, noting that their safety was not in danger. One of the leaks was eliminated using a special composition “Germetal-1”.
Stevens added in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that NASA hopes to work with Roscosmos to develop a “more permanent solution” to the problem.
According to Reuters, NASA and Roscosmos, the two main operators of the International Space Station, have “been arguing for months about the causes and possible solutions to small air leaks” in the Russian service module, which is “a key structure of the ISS.”
According to an anonymous senior NASA official, air leaks have been relatively small in recent months, but on Friday, June 5, the rate increased from one pound per day to two, which appears to be a significant problem.
There are currently seven people on the ISS on two missions, including the crew of Crew-12, which arrived at the station in February. Another team, consisting of one American astronaut Christopher Williams and two cosmonauts from Russia – Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev – arrived at the station in November last year.
According to a Reuters interlocutor at NASA, it was Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev who were engaged in repairs, the plan of which was not approved by the American side. In this regard, mission control in Houston decided to use evacuation protocols.
Orders for “enhanced safety measures” are rarely imposed on the International Space Station, although the process has been triggered in recent years due to space debris that could collide with the ISS. Over the 27 years of the space object’s existence, astronauts have never had to evacuate from it to Earth, the news agency adds.
