It’s official: A persistent air leak in the Zvezda module of the International Space Station forced Russia to permanently seal off the Transfer Chamber (PrK) to one of the structure’s few docking ports from pressurized access. In the movie version, this is when Tom Hanks would click on his radio to announce, “Houston, we had a problem. Now we just have a complication. Or two.”
I’ll get to the complications in a moment — think of them as “space Jenga” for now — but first, you need to know how the Russians got to the point of crippling a vital ISS section.
Back in June, “in a moment of very high drama,” as Eric Berger put it for Ars Technica, “NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.”
The issue was “persistent cracks” in the PrK that provides access to the Russian docking port. The cracks started showing up in 2019, leading to minor air leaks. Berger added then that “Russian astronauts [sic] have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.”
No, they did not try duct tape or Flex Seal. At least not that I’m aware of.
Whatever repair work the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, proposed at the time “spooked NASA officials, prompting them to take the extreme step of securing their astronauts inside Dragon in case of a depressurization event.”
AKA, in case something went kablooey and our astronauts needed to make an emergency trip home from a dying space station.
Nobody has said much since the June incident, and NASA officials reportedly stayed mum because they didn’t want to embarrass their Roscosmos partners. Or at least not cause them any further embarrassment. After all, it isn’t every day that you send your partner’s astronauts scurrying for the escape capsule. But the upshot is that both NASA and Roscosmos probably knew four months ago that the PrK’s leaks weren’t repairable, and that sealing it off was the only option. Now it’s official.
