GoKawiilFive of the seven crew members on the International Space Station briefly sought refuge inside a SpaceX return capsule Friday morning as two Russian cosmonauts worked on an air leak on the other end of the complex.
NASA ordered US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft around 9 am EST (14:00 UTC) on Friday. The foursome launched aboard the SpaceX crew capsule on the Crew-12 mission in February, and the ship serves as their lifeboat until the crew’s scheduled return to Earth in September.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the station in a Russian Soyuz ferry ship, joined the Crew-12 astronauts inside the Dragon spacecraft.
“All USOS (US Orbital Segment) crew members need to execute … Emergency Procedure 3.4: Crew Dragon, establish Safe Haven,” NASA mission control radioed to the station crew around 9 am. “If we need (you) to suit up, we will do that once we’re inside the Dragon.”
A short time later, a NASA spokesperson posted a statement on X attributing the shelter order to a repair on persistent air leaks on the Russian segment of the space station. For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have tracked the leak rate from a transfer tunnel on the back end of Russia’s Zvezda Service Module. The tunnel, known by the Russian acronym PrK, leads to a docking port for Progress resupply and refueling freighters.
Engineers believe the leaks are caused by microscopic cracks in the module’s structure. Russian cosmonauts have repeatedly inspected and attempted to seal the cracks, but a permanent fix has eluded them. After a few months of pressure stability inside the PrK earlier this year, Roscosmos confirmed in May that the air leaks had returned.