It's official: A persistent air leak in the Zvezda module of the International Space Station forced Russia to permanently seal off the Transfer Chamber (PrK) to one of the structure's few docking ports from pressurized access. In the movie version, this is when Tom Hanks would click on his radio to announce, "Houston, we had a problem. Now we just have a complication. Or two."
I'll get to the complications in a moment — think of them as "space Jenga" for now — but first, you need to know how the Russians got to the point of crippling a vital ISS section.
Back in June, "in a moment of very high drama," as Eric Berger put it for Ars Technica, "NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft."
The issue was "persistent cracks" in the PrK that provides access to the Russian docking port. The cracks started showing up in 2019, leading to minor air leaks. Berger added then that "Russian astronauts [sic] have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1."
No, they did not try duct tape or Flex Seal. At least not that I'm aware of.
Whatever repair work the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, proposed at the time "spooked NASA officials, prompting them to take the extreme step of securing their astronauts inside Dragon in case of a depressurization event."
AKA, in case something went kablooey and our astronauts needed to make an emergency trip home from a dying space station.
Nobody has said much since the June incident, and NASA officials reportedly stayed mum because they didn't want to embarrass their Roscosmos partners. Or at least not cause them any further embarrassment. After all, it isn't every day that you send your partner's astronauts scurrying for the escape capsule. But the upshot is that both NASA and Roscosmos probably knew four months ago that the PrK's leaks weren't repairable, and that sealing it off was the only option. Now it's official.
So now what? That's where it gets complicated.
The Zvezda PrK was primarily used by Russia's Progress cargo ships to deliver food, water, oxygen, equipment, experiments, spares, etc. It was only occasionally used by Soyuz capsules for crew transfers. More importantly, however, PrK is the preferred port for boosting missions, when a Progress capsule would use its engine to give the ISS a little orbital boost to keep it flying at the proper altitude.
And Another Thing: As I write this, I wonder if age and boost stress led to Zvezda's unsealable cracks. The module launched in 2000, and that's a long time for anything to endure the extremes of Low Earth Orbit, plus serving as the connection point for booster thrusts.
It helps a little to think of the ISS's docking ports as the world's most valuable parking spots, and who gets to use which for what is scheduled long in advance. One of those spots is now (mostly) out of service, so the scheduling is a little topsy-turvy.
Russian Space Web reported Tuesday that next month's Progress MS-36 resupply mission is "the first cargo mission scheduled to unload its cargo and perform orbit corrections of the ISS at different docking ports." So the Progress will dock and unload its cargo through Russia's Poisk module, then scurry back to PrK to give ISS a boost, and then return to Poisk to take on trash and anything else that needs transfer back to Earth sometime in the next six months or so.
As I said, it's a little like space Jenga, and it's the new normal for as long as ISS remains in orbit, probably until sometime 2030, or maybe as late as 2032.
Maybe on the next SpaceX Dragon cargo flight, Elon Musk could throw in a can or two of Flex Seal.
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