NASA directed astronauts aboard the International Space Station to take shelter in their spacecraft and be ready for a possible evacuation Friday as Russian cosmonauts worked to address a worsening air leak in the Russian segment of the orbiting laboratory.
The four astronauts of NASA’s Crew-12 mission aboard the station - two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut - along with another U.S. astronaut, were ordered by NASA mission control at 9:04 a.m. ET (1304 GMT) on Friday to enter their SpaceX-built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.
They were instructed to don their spacesuits in case the air leak worsens and an emergency evacuation becomes necessary, Stevens said. NASA reversed the order roughly two hours later and told the astronauts they could return to the station as the agency and its Russian counterparts examined the rate of leaking air.
NASA and Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the station's two primary operators, have debated for months over the cause and potential fixes of small air leaks aboard Russia's Zvezda service module, a key structure of the ISS, a football field-size orbital laboratory where astronauts live and work in space. Roscosmos did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The air leaks have been relatively minor in recent months but escalated on Friday from a pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
The ISS is currently home to seven astronauts from two missions, including the Crew-12 team - 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 of one U.S. astronaut, Christopher Williams, and two cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, arrived in November. Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev, who did not execute evacuation procedures, are using a saw to break into an area where they believe they can access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said. NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official said, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures.
Safe-haven orders are rare on the International Space Station, though pieces of space debris that risk 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.
