ISS astronauts on evacuation alert as air leak worsens
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been ordered to take shelter in their spacecraft and prepare to potentially leave as a Russian crew tries to fix a worsening air leak in its section of the orbital laboratory, NASA said.
The four astronauts on NASA’s Crew-12 mission to the station — two U.S. astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut — received orders from NASA mission control at 11:04 p.m. Friday to enter the Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the station and put on spacesuits in case an air leak required an emergency evacuation, a NASA official said.
The station’s two main operators, NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, debated for months over the cause and potential solutions for small air leaks in Russia’s Zvezda service module, a key structure in the football field-sized laboratory.
The air leaks have been relatively small in recent months but rose from about 453 grams of air per day to 906 grams on Monday, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
