NASA orders astronauts to shelter as Russian air leaks repaired
Joey Roulette
Washington: Worsening air leaks at the International Space Station forced five astronauts to take shelter and prepare for evacuation for about two hours Friday as Russia tried to repair a crack in its portion of the orbital laboratory, NASA said.
The four astronauts of NASA’s Crew-12 mission on the station – two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut – along with another US astronaut, were ordered by NASA mission control to enter the SpaceX-built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the station at 9.04am ET on Friday (11.04pm AEST on Friday). NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens said:.
NASA reversed that order about two hours later and told the astronauts they could return to the station while the agency and Russian colleagues examined the rate of air leakage.
The station’s two main operators, NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, have been arguing for months over the cause and potential solutions for small air leaks in Russia’s Zvezda service module, a key structure on the ISS, a football-field-sized orbital laboratory where astronauts live and work in space.
Roscosmos said on Friday that its experts had detected two leaks on the ISS but that there was no immediate threat to the crew. Stating that the first leak was quickly closed and preparations were continuing to close the second leak, Roscosmos added that there was no threat to the spacecraft’s systems.
The air leaks have been relatively small in recent months but have increased from half a kilo of air per day to two kilos per day on Friday, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
The ISS currently hosts seven astronauts from two missions, including the Crew-12 crew (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, consisting of US astronaut Christopher Williams and two cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, arrived in November.
The NASA official said that Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev, who did not follow evacuation procedures, planned to use a saw to enter an area they believed they could access through an air-leaking crack.
NASA officials opposed this method, the NASA official said, demanding that mission control in Houston order safe haven procedures.
Stevens said NASA reversed the safe haven order and told astronauts they could return the space station after Roscosmos halted efforts to repair the rift.
“We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks,” he said.
Safe harbor orders are rare on the International Space Station, but pieces of space debris at risk of colliding with the ISS and smaller changes in air leak rates have triggered the process in recent years.
Astronauts have never had to evacuate the ISS in its 27-year history.
Reuters
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