Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were ordered by NASA to take shelter in their spacecraft and prepare for possible evacuation on Friday as a Russian crew worked to fix an increasingly severe air leak in part of its orbital laboratory, NASA said.
The four NASA Crew-12 mission astronauts aboard the station – two US astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut – got orders from NASA mission controllers at 9:04 a.m. ET Monday (1304 GMT) to enter their Crew Dragon spacecraft docked at the station and don spacesuits in case an air leak required emergency evacuation, a NASA official said.
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NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, the station’s two main operators, have been arguing for months over the cause and potential repair of a small air leak in Russia’s Zvezda service module, which is the football field-sized laboratory’s main structure.
Air leaks have been relatively small in recent months but increased on Monday from one pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be identified.
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