Nasa postpones launch while it investigates space station leaks

SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft undocking from the International Space Station last year Photo / Nasa

Nasa said today it was postponing a launch of private astronauts to the International Space Station while it works with its Russian counterparts to investigate persistent leaks on the orbiting laboratory.

In a statement, Nasa said that Russian cosmonauts recently sealed “some areas of interest” in a module on the Russia side of the space station.

As a result, “the segment is holding pressure”, Nasa said.

It added that crews also noticed a “new pressure signature”, and need additional time “to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary”.

Later, Nasa issued another statement: “The crew aboard the International Space Station is safely conducting normal operations”.

The space station, which is now more than 20 years old, has suffered small cracks for years.

But last year Nasa said it had identified four cracks in the Russian module and about 50 other “areas of concern”, leading Nasa to classify the problem at its highest level of risk.

Nasa has also been working with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to keep the hatch to the small module open only during critical operations.

While the hatch is open, Nasa has required its astronauts to stay on the US side of the station so that they can be close to their spacecraft in case of an emergency that would force them to board it and evacuate.

In a report last year, Nasa’s inspector general called the cracks a “top safety risk” and said that in April “Nasa identified an increase in the leak rate to its highest level to date”.

At the time, the inspector general said that the space agencies were focusing on welds that may have deteriorated.

Nasa currently hopes to keep flying the ISS through to 2030. After then it would hope to be replaced by one or more private space stations designed and operated by commercial companies such as Axiom Space, Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, Voyager Space and Vast. (Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, owns the Washington Post.)

But it’s unclear whether those companies could have a station ready by the time the ISS reaches the end of its life.

There are currently seven people on the ISS, including Nasa astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers and Jonny Kim.

Also on board are Kirill Peskov, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of Russia and Takuya Onishi of Japan.

They were to be joined for about two weeks by a group of four private citizens on a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a private space company based in Houston. They were to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

In a post on X, Kam Ghaffarian, the executive chairman of Axiom Space, wrote that the company “will continue to work with all of our partners to finalise a new launch date and look forward to flying the Ax-4 mission soon”.