A Russian-controlled segment of the International Space Station is leaking, allowing pressure and air to bleed out. The situation has reached a fever pitch as cosmonauts scramble to patch problem areas and officials from Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and NASA disagree about the severity of the problem.
The football field-size space laboratory must remain pressurized and filled with breathable gases to host a rotating crew of astronauts, which it has done since 2000 in separate but connected Russian and US sections. Problematic leaks were first identified in 2019 in a tunnel that connects a Russian module, called Zvezda, to a docking port that welcomes spacecraft carrying cargo and supplies.
But the rate at which the module is bleeding air hit a new high this year.
The US space agency “has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the (leaking module) and the possibility of a catastrophic failure,” said former NASA astronaut Bob Cabana, chair of the agency’s ISS Advisory Committee, during a meeting on the issue Wednesday.
