{"id":603865,"date":"2026-05-26T00:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T00:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/603865\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T00:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T00:44:11","slug":"the-international-space-station-has-sprung-a-new-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/603865\/","title":{"rendered":"The International Space Station has sprung a new leak"},"content":{"rendered":"

The very premium air leak in the very best Russian part of the International Space Station<\/a> is back! It may well be that, much like the Little Green Men in Crimea, it’s been there waiting to cause trouble all along. If you’re not a space person, let us bring you up to speed.<\/p>\n

Back in 2019, Roscosmos \u2014 Russia’s space agency \u2014 gave NASA a heads-up that it had detected an\u00a0air leak<\/a>\u00a0in the tunnel connecting Russia’s ISS Zvezda Service Module to the rest of the space station. From then until last year, the two space agencies and their astronauts have been trying to run down exactly where the leak was in the tunnel. In late 2025, it looked like they’d managed to sort things out: instrumentation on the ISS indicated that air pressure was no longer decreasing. Buuuut, jump forward to this week and, sadly, not so much. Despite multiple patch jobs and the best efforts of some of the brightest and bravest our planet has to offer, the leak has returned. This is a big deal. If you have a slow leak in a car tire, you can simply keep topping it off with an air pump every time you stop for gas, until you can get it fixed. A slow leak in a spacecraft \u2014 the sort that hisses through microscopic cracks in the vessel’s hull \u2014 can lead to a decompression event.<\/p>\n

For the time being, NASA and Roscosmos have told the ISS crew to keep on keeping on, just as they did in the past. But, as Ars Technica<\/a> points out:<\/p>\n

internally, however, there appears to be greater concern. The Russian leaks have been classified as a “5” on both high likelihood and high consequence in the agency’s 5\u00d75 risk matrix, with the potential for “catastrophic failure” discussed in meetings.<\/p>\n

Given the increasingly tight budgets for maintaining the aging space station, NASA is hoping to keep the ISS in orbit and in use until 2032. It’s hoped that by then, a modern commercial space station or two will be able to take the place of humanity’s long-serving bastion in the stars.<\/p>\n

Previously:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The very premium air leak in the very best Russian part of the International Space Station is back!…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[23736,205891,116286,205892,407,408,130924,92,411,90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-603865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-astronauts","tag-bad-things","tag-cosmonaut","tag-decompression","tag-international-space-station","tag-iss","tag-leakage","tag-nasa","tag-roscosmos","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}