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By Euronews
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NASA is reported to have ordered astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to be ready to evacuate because of ‘air leaks’.
International media, including the Daily Mail, report that the US space agency has instructed the crew to prepare for a possible evacuation. The issue concerns a leak in a Russian module of the station, which has been plagued by similar problems since 2019.
Bethany Stevens, a NASA press officer, said in a statement posted on X that ‘the transfer tunnel of the Zvezda service module, known as PrK, has long had cracks and leaks, which Roscosmos has until now contained as far as possible.’
Following new leaks, Roscosmos decided to carry out more extensive repair work on Friday 5 June. As a precaution, NASA ordered the four members of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission and US astronaut Chris Williams to implement maximum safety measures inside the Dragon spacecraft for the duration of the operation.
‘We continue to work with our Russian counterparts and with the rest of the international community in support of the Space Station, in order to reach a lasting solution.’
There are currently four astronauts from NASA’s Crew-12 mission on board (two Americans, one French astronaut and one Russian), and the order from NASA’s mission control to board the Crew Dragon spacecraft is reported to have come at 9.04 a.m. (US East Coast time) last Monday.
According to the Daily Mail, a NASA official specified that the crew had been told to put on their spacesuits for an emergency evacuation.
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, the station’s two main operators, have spent months discussing the cause and possible solutions to the small air leaks in the Russian Zvezda service module, a key structure of the laboratory, which is as large as a football pitch.
The air leaks had been relatively minor in recent months, but on Monday they increased from half a kilogram of air a day to a full kilogram. To put that into perspective, an average adult human exhales and inhales between 10 and 15 kg of air a day.
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