NASA orders astronauts on evacuation alert as space station air leak worsens

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - Five astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were ordered by NASA to shelter in their spacecraft and prepare for potential evacuation on Friday ‌as a Russian crew attempted to fix a worsening air leak on its portion of ‌the orbital laboratory, NASA said.

The four astronauts of NASA's Crew‑12 mission aboard the station — two Americans, a French astronaut and a ​Russian cosmonaut — along with another U.S. astronaut were ordered by NASA mission control at 9:04 a.m. ET (1304 GMT) on Friday to enter their SpaceX‑built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.

They were instructed to don their spacesuits in case the air leak worsens and an emergency evacuation becomes necessary, ‌Stevens said. NASA reversed the order ⁠roughly two hours later and told the astronauts they could return to the station as the agency and its Russian counterparts examined the rate of leaking air.

NASA ⁠and Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the station's two primary operators, have debated for months over the cause and potential fixes of small air leaks aboard Russia's Zvezda service module, a key structure of the ISS, a football field-size ​orbital laboratory ​where astronauts live and work in space.

Roscosmos did not ​immediately respond to request for comment.

The air ‌leaks have been relatively minor in recent months but escalated on Friday from a pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.

The ISS is currently home to seven astronauts from two missions, including the Crew‑12 team — NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — who arrived in ‌February.

The other crew of one U.S. astronaut, Christopher Williams, and ​two cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, arrived in November.

Kud-Sverchkov ​and Mikayev, who did not execute evacuation ​procedures, are using a saw to break into an area where they believe they ‌can access the crack leaking air, the ​NASA official said. NASA officials ​disagreed with this method, the NASA official said, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures.

Safe-haven orders are rare on the International Space Station, though pieces of space debris that ​risk colliding with the ISS and ‌smaller changes in air leak rates have triggered the process in recent years. Astronauts have ​never had to evacuate the ISS in its 27 year history.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; ​Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Joe Brock and Nick Zieminski)