Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
bbc.com
bbc.com
"NASA’s Robotic External Leak Locator (RELL) is a robotic, remote-controlled tool that helps mission operators detect the location of an external leak and rapidly confirm a successful repair.
… Two instruments working in sync give RELL its ammonia-detecting superpowers. … Mass spectrometer & Ion vacuum pressure gauge"
“You crawl around outside and smell for astronaut wizz.”
Now I wonder if it basically lasts forever or if it has problems with corrosion.
I'm clearly not understanding what they're trying to say here. If _one_ leak was sealed, but the air was "escaping elsewhere", it would still be a leak, causing pressure readings to drop.
Thanks
https://www.engineering.com/the-nauka-module-iss-mishap-what...
It was surreal to follow when it was happening, NASA was seriously underplaying what was going on and it was up to amateurs with telescopes looking at the station to tell the world that the situation is still ongoing.
This is one of the three major mishaps related to Nauka.
Naively, I would assume that there are airlocks between the different sections of the ISS. I would also assume that they would close these airlocks while doing the kind of work they are doing to repair the leaks.
So, assuming I'm right (and my assumptions might be wrong,) why do the astronauts need to shelter?
I.e. leaving the actual ISS structure entirely.
There are not. The airlocks on the ISS are either docking modules for spacecraft, for spacewalks, or for deploying satellites.
The crew shelters in the vehicles so that in case of an emergency they can evacuate immediately.
Not exactly something you want to be doing under time pressure.
I guess the main question about this kind of routing is if things are safer kept on the unpressurized side or not. And that the risk of a small hole on the hull is offset by reducing the risk of leaks in the pressurised area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3
had a machine gun!
There was also Polyus which was going to be an entire battle station designed to counter Reagan's SDI satellites[0], but it never made it into orbit. It had lasers, though.
[0]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...
They'd cover around 1.5 billion km (<1 billion miles), and be past Saturn's orbit if fired away from the Sun. But it would not achieve escape velocity on its own, and the station was obviously moving relative to Sun and Earth, so we'd have to account for it too.
One of the innovations of ISS is larger docking adapter with bulkhead that is removed after docking. Russian section still uses hatches. All of the cables go through the docking adapter or hatch which makes impossible to close door or quickly disconnect.
>> "SOMEDAY, THE international Space Station will descend, but if you're frightened at the prospect of a million-pound hunk of metal falling out of the sky, take heart. NASA does have a plan to decommission the space station eventually without creating havoc. The European Space Agency is planning to build three expendable space vehicles by 2003: two of them will ferry propellant, the other will force the station to land in a designated area. Called an automated transfer vehicle (ATV), the craft will be unmanned, similar to the Russian Progress resupply vehicle but larger, with enough thrust to nudge the entire station down in a single piece-a cheaper and safer alternative to hauling pieces of the station down in multiple trips. Roughly 90 percent of the station will be cinder by the time it reaches Earth's atmosphere; a Pacific splashdown is the plan.-Gunfan Sinha"
It's now used as the basis of the Orion service module, whilst ISS resupply is currently done by Cygnus and Cargo Dragon on the American side and Progress on the Russian.
Obviously they can't, it looks like an obvious solution they couldn't have missed. But I wonder why it is impossible to do.
It might be hard to access the actual pressure hull from the inside (there's probably insulation and padding on top)
If you use paint, you somehow have to get rid of the solvent in it when it dries, which might be a problem when painting a whole module
I don't know what solvents would do, but I remember that astronauts' bone density loss in space means there are challenges around managing the significant amount of calcium captured by the air scrubbers in the ISS.
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/f8ca865b-1...
Quoting an ISS astronaut: Today's coffee is tomorrow's coffee.
If you mean on the inside, it'd be a lot of time and disruption to devote to maintenance on a station that's already having to spend an increasing amount of time on maintenance instead of science.
The modules have a lot of stuff that has been wired between them over the years, all that would need to be sorted out, consequences understood and more before ever starting the work, and by then it'll be time for the ISS to retire anyway.
Wouldn't all paint works well in microgravity? If it didn't, I would think you wouldn't be able to apply it to your floor, walls, and ceiling, with the same paint.
Paint that would fall to the ground if it didn't stick to anything on Earth, would just be floating around in microgravity. Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
> Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
This is a solved problem with the ECLSS system [1], required from humans releasing ~3.3 lbs of water per day, and exhaling gases that must not accumulate or form dead zones, and normal VOCs scrubbers [2] due to most modern materials releasing them.
I suspect it would be more of a "how many extra filters do we send" type problem and cycling the collected water a couple more times.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-concentrations-o...
Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
In college, we'd use toothpaste for the holes left from nails in the walls we hung up our posters with.
Or coat the outside with a soapy water solution.
Now, will it immediately off-gas and embrittle on exposure to vacuum? Different question.
Doing the whole module sounds like a lot of mass though.
A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
Because it's more extreme.
Do you think a soft vacuum of 0.002 atmospheres of pressure would be notably easier to prevent leaks into?
> A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
Wasn't the fix on the ground a secret patch by the person that drilled the hole? I don't trust that to have been done properly.
And then when they noticed it was leaking... they used the super aerospace epoxy. Which was labeled as temporary but as far as I know it's still the fix.
Also that was a serious hole, 2mm wide, not a microhole like you'd try to fix with paint.
So my obvious solution is obviously too obvious to be right, and obviously the right solution is not obvious.
The sad thing, is you are just reiterating what I've said already, without providing any useful answer. "Paint obviously is not the right tool" is a statement that not just not obvious for me, it looks simply wrong. They search for microcracks and use a sealant to seal them. Sealant is not a paint obviously, but in the same ballpark.
So, the sealant has to be either a 2-part epoxy (harder to mix and apply), or a UV-cured epoxy. It has to adhere to a vast array of surfaces, since we cannot predict if the next leak will be in aluminum, cracked ceramic, silicone gasket, rubber gasket, plastic.... Anything it outgasses must be extremely inert, so that it doesn't cause a new problem when it reacts with a different surface (the gas on the ISS is never diluted by a giant planetwide reservoir).
Paint is obviously not a two-part epoxy nor a UV-curing epoxy; nor is it guaranteed to have fully inert outgases; finally it is not likely to be adherent to all the possible surfaces.
It's as if the situation requires a robotic diamond drill, and you propose we hit it with a big rock. The big rock won't do.
Clearly this needs some JB-Weld :P
wait, do they have to have matched CTE and k to the existing material... hmm
Paper?
No Paper. No string. No sellotape.
Because, space. It's hard. Unbelievably hard.
It looks like NASA helped redesign it to be safer, creating the modern Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG) system still in use on the ISS as the backup.
They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23
Conservation of mass: if a cubic meter of air escapes, that's 1.25 kg, and you need at least that much in candles. (You actually need 2 kg because the candle isn't solid oxygen)
There's ultimately 1.2 t of atmosphere on the ISS. This will also result in a pure oxygen atmosphere, which is dangerous. You need nitrogen.
Why the difference? It's a question of what risks you were most afraid of. Even today, every single spacewalk is done at 0.4atm pure O2- trying to do a spacewalk at 100kPa even the strongest man in the world would have trouble bending his arms- so before a spacewalk the astronauts need to spend several hours pre-breathing pure O2 to get all the nitrogen out of their bloodstream before they can do a spacewalk. The Apollo program thought it was safer if the astronauts could do a spacewalk at literally any point in the mission, so that's what the spacecraft was designed around.
On the other hand, for long duration spaceflight, introducing a different pressure and atmosphere is just another potential source of health problems. Even today, the largest source of information on how human bodies last under 0.4atm pure O2 is the three Skylab missions from 1973-1974. And so the Soviets- who were always more interested in space stations than the moon- and NASA during the Shuttle era went with the atmosphere that seemed like it offered less health risks for people staying on a space station.
Okay, so what about the Apollo 1 fire? To speed up testing, Apollo 1 did two tests at the same time: the Plugs-Out Test, where the astronauts were in the spacecraft with everything running and practicing their countdown, and the Overpressure test where they pressurized the spacecraft to 1.4 atm (to mimic the pressure differential in outer space). And they did it with pure O2. So you had all of these electronics running in an environment at 1.4atm pure O2. And that was incredibly dangerous, in a way that actual spaceflight, a mere 0.4atm O2, was not. But it was just a test, another in a long string of them, and no one involved ever really analyzed it as a potential hazard.
After Apollo 1 a few things were changed: one was that they did the Plugs Out test and the Overpressure test at different times, and a lot of stuff was turned off for the Overpressure test. Another was that the Apollo capsule at takeoff was 1atm 80/20 until a couple of minutes into flight, when it dumped the cabin atmosphere overboard and replaced it with pure O2 at 0.4atm. That's why the astronauts carried little packs in their arms in all the pictures of them getting into the spacecraft, that's the pure O2 tank that they were breathing off of until they could switch to the atmosphere in the cabin after it was replaced.
1.2t of candles doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of extra payload if they would really be valuable in an emergency. The ISS weighs 400 tons and a napkin estimate says it has had 1000 tons of resupply missions. The candles have a shelf life of 10+ years.
It works out to be more efficient, at least in terms of mass, to send up large tanks of compressed gas instead.
These are usually the same vessels they used to get up to the station.
This has the consequence that if they need to re-dock one of the vessels (for whatever reason) all the astronauts that would normally use that vessel must board it for that menuvre. Just in case it fails to dock again.
And they don't normally have spares.
IIRC, this is a good video on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=82YHM12n2JI
The contingency for the Starliner astronauts in case of an emergency was to strap them down in the cargo area. Which wouldnt be optimal, but better than certain/likely death onboard the ISS.
I expected better from the BBC.
But "Nasa" still looks weirder to me than "NASA" does.
Like writing "The Scsi bus went Awol" instead of "The SCSI bus went AWOL" also looks weird.
Why Nascar, Not NASCAR?
Auto racing fans chafe at our rules on acronyms. Here they are, from our stylebook:
acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the first letter (or letters) of each word in a series: NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization; radar from radio detection and ranging. (Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.) When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco; Unicef.
We limit the uppercasing to four letters because longer strings of capitals are distracting and tend to jump off the page.
https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Or at least, that used to be the rule. I can't find anything newer about their style on their site, but here's a recent article (not published under the Athletic either) that uses "NASCAR":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/sports/autoracing/kyle-bu...
Buddy, you don't need to hand it to the top-level comment here. I am giving you permission to disagree with the style while admitting that the comment is bad. Be free.
Anything larger, say a lost screw driver, would punch thru the ISS like it wasn't even there leading to some ugly consequences.
The ISS can dodge debris by adjusting the height of its orbit.
Corrosion is a hard problem in living quarters (ie moisture and salt) in space (sealed with no gravity)
Don't forget the module we're talking about was built in the 80s originally intended for MIR 2. It's been in service since 2000.
The Soyuz, the MIR, the human space records, the Venera program, closed cycle rockets, all have no equivalent in the West. Even their version of the shuttle was superior (it flew 100% autonomously).
I don't like Musk, but he single handedly saved the Western space programs.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
They've also got some new passenger jets certified and about to enter production (MC-21 and SU-100).
Don't blame Russian space failures on the war.
Roskosmos was robbed blind by the likes of Dmitry Rogozin long before 2022. The Angara heavy launcher project has been started in the 1990s and still reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. The Vostochnyi cosmodrome has been a black hole in red numbers for some 15 years etc. Things were "meh" even during the times when oil was 140 USD per barrel and Russia had no sanctions going against it.
Im Italo-American. The closest I ever got to Russia was my cousin going to Moscow to, and I quote: "learn new things, like how to snort vodka"
It seems to me that you are projecting your dislike of the government of Russia into your evaluation of their engineering merits.
They landed drones on Venus, and on the Moon before Apollo 11
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
Nothing in the Russian space program in the last few decades have been as dangerous as Boeings little fiasco. Yes, the modules have long term problems, but they're built by the Russians because they have the most experience in space living quarters.
Look at space mission fatalities, the least Soviet/Russian one was in 1971 and that includes the 90s.
Thats 55 years
The US since then has had two shuttle disintegrations, the latest in 2003 when the US gave up launching astronauts for a few decades.
Space is hard.
Why are you commenting then if you don't even know what the topic of the conversation is? Just to distract from the issue with unrelated facts to defend mother Russia's image? Do you even realize how much like a propaganda troll account you sound?
You spewed BS about the Soyuz, which isn't part of the ISS.
Well if minor Soyuz problems are in play, I raise you two Shuttle disintegrations and a Boeing craft since the last fatal Soyuz accident in 1971.
You know instead of throwing "Russian troll darts" try practicing "strategic empathy", instead of letting your emotions blind you about engineering principles. Sone pointers:
- Space is hard.
- The Russians are good at it.
- So are we.
- The Russians are better at keeping people alive in space.
- We're better at sensors and materials.
- Historically Russian launches are cheaper (thats changed)
- Historically we've had money to launch more (that's changed)
Kindest Regards,
American materials engineer (guess who I work for)
And you just keep digging yourself in instead of admitting you were wrong. But everything you say makes you look more desperate.
We had two astronauts stranded in space for the better part of a year just last year!
Except you forgot to mention an epic leak in Destiny just three years after it was attached to the ISS: "At its highest rate, the station was leaking about 5 pounds of air per day overboard." [0] Imagine that happening on the 4th year of American Mars mission.
Also, if you on American mission to Mars, it would be reasonable to worry about cooling system dying mid-flight requiring three spacewalks to fix it: "We'd lose cooling capability to half of the electronics on the U.S., European and Japanese part of the space station." [1]
Generally firmware can't be updated by the end user because there is physically no way to do so without returning the hardware. (Unless an update mechanism is specifically implemented in hardware, obv)
Pucker factor goes way up because if you ship a bug, there's no way back. If you aren't careful, you can break physical devices which can have consequences anywhere from thousands of RMAs to burning down a user's house depending on the hardware and how bad you fucked up.
The deployment process itself is about the same. Tests and more tests, including testing on prototype and/or pre-production units. Hardware testing can get wild depending on application, but I don't think any SWE would find it too surprising. Then you email a binary to your manufacturer and pray
I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.
Just convincing them that their problem boiled down to a single incorrect bit was difficult enough but then having to, in a day, build and successfully operate a test harness to prove the fix worked was the real stress.
I do not miss embedded engineering.
I don't think any crewed interplanetary mission is going to last that long for the foreseeable future.
I suppose that they were counting on the capability to resupply, otherwise they might have carried more contingencies from launch, but still.
Surely this was considered when building the first modules.
You don't get the AtOx going to mars but you have everything else which will utterly take its toll on a traveling craft.
So in a cylindrical ship you'd want to have one end pointing at the Sun most of the trip. This is, of course, very different in effect on the hull compared to the repeated expansion and contraction of heating cycles.
> Astronauts told to return to International Space Station after sheltering over air leak repairs.
Publications have had live-updating articles for things ongoing for years. This seems both entirely reasonable and normal, and I'm not sure what the concern or issue is.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
So, even if you use original title, once "Live Update" article changes, it might seem that submission did not use original title.
(Submitted title was "Astronauts on ISS told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks", no doubt because that's what the article said at the time.)
Thats why the ISS can have small leaks like this that are a problem but not catastrophic like they would be in a deep sea submarine.
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
For comparison, a can of soda has around 2-3 atm depending on its temperature.
https://www.reuters.com/world/nasa-live-international-space-...
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were using a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said.
NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official added, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures."
It's a hot take but I do think the US should be more appreciative of Russia's longstanding contributions to the ISS and other space projects of international cooperation and factor that into sanctions decisions. We do need their help as much as they need ours in space, and the fact that they are still helping us despite our treatment of them speaks volumes about their leaders' character.
For example: "The space station is made up of Russian and US segments, and there are modules from the European and Japanese space agencies too." It feels like this sentence is inserting some points, but is lacking in authorial intent. Is the intent to say the station is largely Russian and US, or to say the station has more than two partners? Probably an okay sentence, but still feels like a stone in the shoe.
I don't think you'll find that type of language in the more traditionally published/edited articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Orbital_Segment
Several of the US modules were built in Europe by Thales Alenia Space and were transferred to the US in exchange for the US launching the European modules on the Space Shuttle.
(All this was pretty lucid of the US, but obviously the Russians did no such thing on their side. The Japanese even managed to get an ISS resupply mission launched on their own vehicle, which is no small achievement, and the ESA did a bunch of good science. And what would space be without the Canadarm :-)
Why obviously?
The USSR invited cosmonauts from all over the world to fly and work at the Salut-6, Salit-7 and Mir stations.[0]
That's France, Britain, Austria, Japan, India, Soviet block countries, Mongolia, Vietnam, Syria and Afghanistan.
Quite the opposite, the West welcomed weak and crumbling Russia. To a limited extend, of course, but still Russia joined G7 and many European organizations. Western companies were busy buying privatized Soviet assets pennies on the dollar.
Several other countries contributed, in an attempt to include other nations, but for all practical purposes it is an American/Soviet(Russian) project from a more civiled age of international competition. I think its appropriate the article remind us of this. A lot of people wasn't born them, and have no idea that once science had less borders.
Rumors are that Elon gets spaceX to buy tesla so tele-operated Optimus robots do the hard space work from now on. Not a bad idea per se but I’m not educated on the topic. Curiosity has me asking if we really want humans to go to mars or in space at all.