NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the station in a Russian Soyuz ferry ship, joined the Crew-12 astronauts inside the Dragon spacecraft.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll USOS (US Orbital Segment) crew members need to execute \u2026 Emergency Procedure 3.4: Crew Dragon, establish Safe Haven,\u201d NASA mission control radioed to the station crew around 9 am. \u201cIf we need (you) to suit up, we will do that once we\u2019re inside the Dragon.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Zvezda Service Module. The tunnel, known by the Russian acronym PrK, leads to a docking port for Progress resupply and refueling freighters.<\/p>\n
Engineers believe the leaks are caused by microscopic cracks in the module\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
\u201cFollowing new leaks, Roscosmos has elected to proceed with a more extensive repair operation on Friday, June 5,\u201d NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote on X. \u201cOut of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency\u2019s SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back to normal<\/h2>\n
After about 90 minutes, the communications officer at mission control in Houston told the crew that they could reopen hatches and reenter the space station. The specific repair task that caused NASA to issue the shelter order was off. \u201cOur Russian colleagues have elected to perform measurements only today. So, with that, we are comfortable backing out of the safe haven config,\u201d mission control told the crew.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have help from our counterparts?\u201d Crew-12 commander Jessica Meir asked mission control. \u201cAffirm,\u201d mission control replied.<\/p>\n
Those counterparts\u2014Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev\u2014were working at the leak area on the opposite end of the station, some 200 feet away from the Crew Dragon.<\/p>\n
Stevens soon posted an update on X, writing that Roscosmos had \u201cpaused\u201d the \u201cstructural repair efforts\u201d inside the PrK to take more measurements and assess data. \u201cWe look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks,\u201d Stevens added.<\/p>\n
Ars asked two NASA spokespersons for details on the proposed leak repair and why the agency decided that the repair was risky enough to order the US crew members into the Crew Dragon lifeboat. They did not provide answers to these questions as of the time of this publication, but we will add any information we receive to this story.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir inside the International Space Station\u2019s Kibo laboratory module.<\/p>\n Credit: Roscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, typically keeps the PrK sealed off from the rest of the space station to isolate the leak from the crew\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n A statement posted by Roscosmos on its Telegram channel suggests this is what was happening early Friday. \u201cSpecialists from the Russian ISS segment\u2019s main operations control team detected a leak in the chamber\u201d during pressurization of the PrK.<\/p>\n \u201cUpon inspecting the transfer chamber, cosmonauts identified two potential air leak sites,\u201d Roscosmos said. \u201cThe first site was promptly sealed by applying an initial layer of the two-component sealant compound Germetall-1. The second site is located on the conical section of the transfer chamber; preparations to seal it are currently underway.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Roscosmos said there is \u201cno threat to crew safety or onboard systems,\u201d and the pressure inside the station \u201cremains stable and is being maintained at the nominal level.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Five 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/55263960425_9278171c49_k.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n