Russian cosmonauts, station commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev, attempted to fix the problem. Their escape route was the separately docked Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who was a commander of the ISS in 2012, said it had always leaked around half a pound of pressure a day.<\/p>\n
“When you have an area that’s leaking a little more, you get up to a pound a day, maybe a pound a half or even two, then we hit a threshold where, okay, we’ve got to do something about this,” he told BBC Newshour.<\/p>\n
“You’re always one breath away from having to take shelter somewhere if the station has a problem. It’s just a matter of fact of living on board a spaceship.”<\/p>\n
It is not the first time the station has had to deal with this latest leak – the cracks responsible have persisted on and off for around six years.<\/p>\n
However, following the arrival of a Russian cargo ship last month, the Russian space agency Roscosmos noticed a fresh slow pressure drop in the tunnel, prompting the decision to move beyond patchwork fixes and attempt a more extensive repair operation on Friday.<\/p>\n
But it was the method they were planning to use that prompted the order to take shelter, according to news agency Reuters.<\/p>\n
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev were said to be using a saw to try and get into an area to access the crack that was leaking air.<\/p>\n
Nasa disagreed with the method they were using and mission control in Houston ordered five crew to take “safe-haven” procedures on the Dragon ship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian cosmonauts, station commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev, attempted to fix the problem. Their escape…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-625285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625285","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=625285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}