NASA ordered five astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter in an attached SpaceX Dragon spacecraft today while Russian cosmonauts tried to fix a concerning air leak on the orbiting lab.
“Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway,” NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said via X this morning.
The persistent leak, Stevens explained, is in the PrK transfer tunnel, which leads to Russia’s Zvezda service module, one of the oldest parts of the station. This leak, apparently caused by small cracks in the tunnel, has been an issue for years, and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, manages it “through operational mitigation measures and periodic partial-repair efforts,” Stevens wrote.
Those efforts were working until a few months ago, when the leak sprung up again. That development spurred today’s action, which Stevens termed a “more extensive repair operation.”
The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. They arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in mid-February for a six-month stay.
They took shelter today in Crew-12’s Dragon capsule “Freedom,” along with NASA’s Williams, who arrived at the station in late November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Williams flew with two crewmates on that Soyuz — cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. They’re presumably the ones who attempted the PrK leak fix today. (Stevens’ X post did not mention who performed the repair or what exactly the operation entailed.)
Their work didn’t last long, however.
“Roscosmos has paused Friday’s structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, as more measurements and data is assessed,” Stevens wrote via X at 10:57 a.m. EDT (1457 GMT) today, just an hour after her original post about the shelter order.
“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,” she added.
The PrK leak is a reminder of the ISS’ advanced age. Construction of the complex began in 1998, and It has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000. And Zvezda is one of its older pieces: The module launched to orbit in July 2000.
But the ISS still has a fair bit of runway left. It will operate through at least 2030 and potentially until 2032, giving more time for private successors to get up and running in low Earth orbit.
Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated when more information becomes available.