Five NASA astronauts climbed into their docked SpaceX Dragon capsule and pulled on spacesuits Friday while Russian cosmonauts took a saw to a section of the International Space Station, trying to stop an air leak that has been getting worse for years. The crew spent roughly 90 minutes in the spacecraft before the all-clear came, not because the problem was solved, but because Roscosmos paused the repair to collect more data.
The episode is the latest and most visible sign that the ISS, a $100 billion laboratory orbiting 250 miles above Earth, is falling apart faster than the agencies responsible for it can patch it together. NASA plans to keep the station flying until 2030. The question is whether the hardware will cooperate.
NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens laid out the sequence in a series of posts on X. Roscosmos decided to attempt a "more extensive repair operation" inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known by its Russian abbreviation, PrK, located at the rear of the station's Russian segment. The tunnel has suffered from cracks and leaks for some time, Stevens said.
Russian crews used a saw to cut into a section of the station where they believed the leak originated. While that work was underway, NASA ordered all four members of its Crew-12 mission, Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir, Sophie Adenot, and Andrey Fedyaev, plus astronaut Chris Williams to move into the Dragon and suit up.
Stevens described the directive in measured bureaucratic language:
"Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency's SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway."
About 90 minutes later, Roscosmos stopped cutting. Stevens announced the pause and said the crew had been cleared to return to normal operations aboard the station.
"Roscosmos has paused Friday's structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, as more measurements and data are assessed."
In other words, the repair didn't succeed. It stopped so engineers could figure out what they were dealing with.
The Zvezda module's transfer tunnel has been leaking air since 2019. By 2024, the rate had climbed to 1.68 kilograms, about 3.7 pounds, of atmosphere escaping into space every day. A new leak detected on May 1 initially released roughly one pound per day. Reuters reported that the overall loss rate recently doubled from about one pound per day to two, citing a senior NASA official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
NASA is tracking 50 "areas of concern" related to the tunnel's deterioration. Some parts of the Zvezda module date to the 1980s, and the module itself arrived in orbit in 2000. The station was originally designed to remain operational only until 2015. It is now a quarter-century past its first permanently staffed mission in November 2000.
The aging infrastructure extends well beyond one tunnel. NASA's Office of the Inspector General identified 588 replacement parts operating beyond their designed lifetimes in a report issued in September of last year. That is not a typo, 588 parts past their operational shelf life, on a vessel carrying seven human beings at 17,500 miles per hour.
NASA's commercial crew program manager, Steve Stich, has previously stated that SpaceX's Dragon can be powered up within minutes in an emergency. That assurance matters more now than it did five years ago. Getting into a spacesuit alone can take up to 30 minutes, according to NASA, a timeline that leaves little margin if a structural failure develops rapidly.
The ISS stretches 356 feet, weighs roughly 400 tons, and has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 countries over its lifetime. It has completed approximately 146,000 orbits and produced over 400 research papers. Eight private citizens have each paid up to $50 million for the privilege of visiting.
None of those accomplishments change the fact that the station is old. In 2018, astronauts had to rush to fix a hole that appeared in the outer wall of a Soyuz capsule docked at the station. A 2016 photograph taken by ESA astronaut Tim Peake from inside the station's Cupola module showed a 7-millimeter chip gouged out by a tiny piece of space debris, a reminder that even routine orbital conditions are hostile to aging hardware.
NASA currently spends about $3 billion a year on the station program. The agency plans to begin letting the ISS gradually descend from 250 miles to 200 miles starting around 2026, then commission a modified SpaceX Dragon, a so-called "space tug", to push the station out of orbit entirely by 2030. NASA estimates converting the Dragon capsule for that job will cost $1 billion. Whatever material survives reentry is expected to splash into the Pacific Ocean near Point Nemo, the most remote stretch of water on Earth.
Meanwhile, the agencies that built the station are already looking ahead. NASA, ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency are working on a station to orbit the moon, a project tied to the broader Artemis program that recently sent astronauts toward the moon for the first time in decades. Private firm Axiom Space plans to attach its own commercial modules to the ISS around the time Russia intends to launch a separate orbital platform.
Stevens acknowledged the severity of the cracks in careful language:
"The cracks have always been a concern that NASA watches very closely. NASA and Roscosmos have been working to determine the root cause of the cracks, and Roscosmos manages the issue through operational mitigation measures and periodic partial-repair efforts."
Read that again. After years of investigation, the root cause remains undetermined. Roscosmos manages the problem through "mitigation measures and periodic partial-repair efforts", which is another way of saying they keep patching a structure they don't fully understand.
Friday's safe-haven order was not the first time ISS crews have faced emergencies, and it will not be the last. Recent in-flight issues aboard other NASA missions have underscored how quickly routine operations can become urgent when hardware fails in space. The difference aboard the ISS is that the hardware is decades old and the crew cannot simply come home on short notice.
NASA has an evacuation plan. The Dragon can power up fast. Spacesuits are available. But the fact that five astronauts had to climb into a lifeboat while cosmonauts sawed into a wall tells you something about where the margin stands.
Seven people live aboard the station at any given time. The maximum capacity is 13. Up to eight spacecraft can dock simultaneously. Every one of those numbers assumes the hull holds.
Roscosmos has not announced when it will resume cutting. NASA has not disclosed what the additional measurements revealed. The 50 areas of concern remain areas of concern. The 588 parts past their operational lifetimes remain in service.
The station's planned retirement in 2030 is five years away. The Artemis program's early crewed missions are just getting started. And the commercial replacements, Axiom's modules, whatever Russia builds, are still largely on paper or in early development. The gap between the end of the ISS and the start of whatever comes next is real, and it is not shrinking.
The broader challenge facing American spaceflight is not limited to the ISS. Launch failures involving next-generation rockets have raised hard questions about the reliability of the vehicles NASA is counting on for its future beyond low Earth orbit.
For now, the astronauts are back at work aboard the station. The air is still leaking. The root cause is still unknown. And the saw is still on standby.
When your best option is to put astronauts in spacesuits and hope the cosmonauts' saw work holds, you are not managing a space station, you are managing a countdown.
