ISS Leak Scare Underscores Why NASA Is Ready to Send the Aging Outpost to a Fiery End
Five astronauts ordered to take shelter and prepare for evacuation for roughly two hours as Russian crew attempted to fix a crack on its portion of the orbital laboratory,
NASA and Roscosmos are dealing with a worsening but still controlled air leak in the Russian Zvezda service module transfer tunnel (PrK) of the International Space Station (ISS).
The leak briefly prompted NASA to order astronauts into a docked Dragon spacecraft in case an evacuation became necessary.
Mission control in Houston radioed the station around 9 am EST (14:00 UTC) and sent four Crew-12 astronauts into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom: NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. The four launched on Crew-12 in February, and the capsule doubles as their lifeboat until their scheduled return to Earth in September. NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who reached the station aboard a Russian Soyuz, joined them inside the Dragon.
The call from the ground was direct. “All USOS (US Orbital Segment) crew members need to execute … Emergency Procedure 3.4: Crew Dragon, establish Safe Haven,” controllers told the crew. “If we need (you) to suit up, we will do that once we’re inside the Dragon.”
A worsening air leak aboard the International Space Station (ISS) prompted five astronauts to take shelter and prepare for evacuation for roughly two hours on Friday as Russia attempted to fix a crack on its portion of the orbital laboratory, according to NASA. pic.twitter.com/H4PmxSDf4A
— AstroNana (@ImAstroNana) June 7, 2026
However, operations returned to normal relatively quickly while crews continued repairs and monitoring.
NASA reversed that 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 said on Friday that its experts had detected two leaks aboard the ISS but that there was no immediate threat to the crew. The first leak was quickly sealed, and preparations were underway to seal the second one, Roscosmos said, adding that there was no threat to the spacecraft’s systems.
Seven astronauts remain aboard ISS as repairs continue. Read more about what happened: https://t.co/3iNRs4Of5m pic.twitter.com/3CIMpNncLU
— Cybernews (@Cybernews) June 8, 2026
Engineers have traced the problem to microscopic cracks in the PrK structure, which have caused slow leaks of the station’s atmosphere since at least 2019, and have proven difficult to permanently seal.
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.
Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, typically keeps the PrK sealed off from the rest of the space station to isolate the leak from the crew’s living quarters and workstations. This allows the transfer tunnel to be maintained at a lower pressure than the rest of the station. When cosmonauts need to access the area, such as for inspections, repairs, or transferring cargo to or from a docked Progress supply vessel, they pressurize the PrK to match the pressure inside the rest of the station. This allows the cosmonauts to open up the PrK to complete their work.
A statement posted by Roscosmos on its Telegram channel suggests this is what was happening early Friday. “Specialists from the Russian ISS segment’s main operations control team detected a leak in the chamber” during pressurization of the PrK.
…Russian and NASA officials also did not say what compelled Roscosmos to plan an immediate repair after discovering the two potential leak sites on Friday. They also did not say when cosmonauts might try again to patch the leak, or if any future repair effort might again force the US crew members to take shelter.
It’s a good thing that NASA plans to retire the ISS around 2030 using a specially built “space tug,” likely based on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. The $1 billion plan involves a controlled deorbit that will send most of the 400‑ton complex burning up in the atmosphere and the remaining 40–100 tons into the remote Pacific “spacecraft graveyard” at Point Nemo.
NASA officials now say that the last cargo capsule will depart the ISS around mid–2029, ahead of the official end of operations in 2030.
Once the last crew have gone, the station will continue to fall over several months until it reaches the ‘point of no return’ at an altitude of 175 miles (280 km).
Roughly 18 months before the ISS crashes down in 2031, the modified Dragon capsule will dock with the station and prepare to deliver the finishing blow.
Speaking at a press conference in 2024, Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS manager, explained that the tug would do this over several stages over 18 months.
Inside NASA's $1 BILLION plan to destroy the ISS: As the latest leak sparks evacuation fears, experts reveal how the doomed space station will be destroyed in 2030 https://t.co/eF9tARbsJW
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) June 8, 2026
Between aging Russian hardware, recurring microcracks, and geopolitical strain, relying on stop‑gap patches and optimistic press releases does not appear to be a sustainable long‑term strategy. NASA’s decision to fund a controlled, Dragon‑based deorbit and send the aging outpost to a fiery end over Point Nemo is a necessary, responsible transition away from a creaking Cold War–era platform toward newer, commercially driven stations.
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For context, bankers told Reuters that 2x is "modest" by typical IPO standards. What makes it impressive is the… pic.twitter.com/tzgBkh6lUK
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Comments
Disagree with the headline. Agree ISS is aging, but it is a modular structure, constructed out of plug and play chunks – modules. Happily, Zvezda does not appear to be a central module. Remove and replace it with a new one. We will have learned an important thing – that the time of useful service of Russian equipment on a space station is about 20 years. More information is always better than less. Cheers –
We have to learn how to make structures that last t least 50 years in space, on the moon, or on mars. Unfortunately I believe cosmic and solar radiation degrade metal so it isn’t that straightforward or so I’ve read.
Heat up. Cool down. Heat up. Cool down. Metal is gonna crack.
That too, Maybe use some exotic ceramic. Don’t know. I’m not a materials engineer.
20 years isn’t all that bad for an aerospace item or a vehicle, though some make it a lot longer – DC-3, Boeing 707, B-52, Classic Cars – they generally take a lot of Care and Feeding to maintain. Permanent structures on the moon and Mars should last a lot longer because they will use the local regolith for construction. Cheers –
I’ve always considered the ISS to be largely, though not entirely, a waste of time.
Just as the Space Shuttle program moved at a glacial pace and was the unfortunate primary focus of NASA for many years at the expense of potentially new and better launch systems, the ISS has produced relatively little considering all the time, attention, and money it has required.
It is long past time to move on to better things. Luckily, there are several private/commercial space stations in development.
None of the ones in development appear to have anywhere near the size and capability of ISS, Unfortunately. You would think we would be making progress in space and not going backwards.
A great way to follow all the goings on in the space/space exploration industry is the Behind the Black website: https://behindtheblack.com/
Cool. I’ve seen youtube videos from some of the companies or alternate media providers but I’ll check out that site. Thanks.
It’s really an excellent site itself for maintaining a general understanding of things overall, and it provides links to articles and posts that offer more information.
It also has enjoyable/interesting posts every weekday that are unrelated (more often than not) which are worth checking out.
Further, the site owner-operator is a solid conservative who isn’t afraid to share his views and opinions.
Hmm… For a minute there when I read the name of the URL, I thought it was related to “Operation Get Behind the Darkies”, but it was not.
Space is one of the few areas I believe in international cooperation to avoid taking politics into space (hah) and spread the cost out. Everyone seems to be going it alone now. Wasteful and potentially dangerous.
For a space station I’d like to see us build a backbone to which other countries and cooperations could attach their own modules, I suppose you could say this is a modified ISS approach except that there is one vendor for basic connectivity and some degree of services. Perhaps we would charge to connect a module and receive those services,
I would disagree. The projects involving international cooperation generally mean cooperation between government entities, such as NASA, which is a very bloated and inefficient entity. The European Space Agency is another. Private/commercial endeavors are proving more nimble and efficient. They might not lead to some of the more purely scientific studies, but then again agencies like NASA could always pay the private companies for utilization of the space stations they are building.
I would have no problem with the US outsourcing the construction of backbone or hub to a commercial entity. Well essentially there was always some amount of such outsourcing done since NASA never had manufacturing ability but outsource it all except top-level requirements.
The problem with the current approach is it is likely to lead to a lot of small stations assuming all the companies wanting to build them succeed. Nothing will interact or connect to anything else except at a docking port and a great amount of possible synergy will be lost.
Ah well we will just see what happens won’t we.
You might want to spend some time looking at what SpaceX is putting together with Starship. There are a number of video sites that will get you up to speed pretty quickly – NASA Spaceflight, What About It?, Scott Manley, Marcus House, Great SpaceX, etc. There are more. As other commenters have recommended, Behind the Black is also pretty good. You will learn some stuff in the comments section.
The big deal with Starship is not only that it is about to be fully reusable, but it will be rapidly reusable. SpaceX is cranking up a production line capable of turning these beasts out like popcorn. IFT 12 flew a couple weeks ago. There are 3 more under construction / testing for the next flight. And they are HUGE. A single Ship has about the same payload volume as the entire ISS has pressurized. And it will fly for less than $100 million/flight.
We are fast approaching the point where the private sector can do it alone without any international cooperation. And it will all be done on the commercial rather than public dime. We are on the precipice of something really fun, something some of us in the space nerd community have been trying to figure out how to do for two generations. Cheers –
This highlights an obvious/unobvious problem: cracks. The interior of the ISS is *pressurized* much like an aircraft. (It’s also torched and frozen on a regular basis, but we’re going to ignore that for now) Aluminum has serious problems with bending (like pressurizing and depressurizing) and does not heal, so cracks grow. The problem is not *if* the module will eventually rupture, but *when* it will. Aircraft get away with it by regular inspection (a bit tough to do in space) and limiting lifespan. Every pressurized module has this issue at various levels, combined with the occasional grain of sand or fleck of paint hitting at orbital velocity and leaving pits.
It’s going to be interesting when SpaceX orbits a Starship-sized module with a stainless steel pressure vessel, and sets it up as a 10x sized space station.
Don’t ignore constant radiation that introduce microfractures, If this was science fiction I’d say the way to go would be to capture a good size asteroid, hollow it out, and build inside it to give protection from radiation and micrometeorites.
Gonna be hard to do that with an orbiting rubble pile, which seem to be a significant part of the population. OTOH, if you can figure out how to process the ices from an asteroid / comet, you can use the leftovers to build something permanent. The ices become propellant, air, water and radiation shielding. Musk’s SpaceX IPO have a couple graphics with a Ship at an asteroid. Cheers –
Can’t they send a roll of duct tape up there? That’s what the stuff was designed for.
“Uzbeks cracked my bodywork!”