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The International Space Station is a marvel of modern engineering that has been orbiting the Earth for more than 25 years. There has never been an emergency that has required the astronauts aboard it flee, but they were prepared to do so on Friday due to an air leak that forced them to retreat to a spacecraft attached to it.
Yuri Gagarin became the first person to head into outer space when the Soviet cosmonaut spent close to two hours in orbit in 1961, and the United States scored a win of its own in the Space Race when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon nine years later.
The Americans and the Russians joined forces in the wake of the Cold War for an incredibly ambitious venture in the form of the International Space Station, the extraterrestrial laboratory that was launched in 1998. Since then, close to 300 people have spent time aboard the ISS as part of the steady rotation of astronauts tasked with conducting experiments and collecting data around 250 miles above the surface of our planet.
They are also tasked with keeping an eye out for issues and fixing problems when they arise, including the multiple air leaks that recently sparked a brief evacuation.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station briefly fled to a craft docked to it over an air leak issue
There are currently seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station (four from America, three from Russia, and another from France), three of whom were transported there in a Soyuz vessel last November and four who hitched a ride on a SpaceX craft in February.
The ISS consists of a number of different modules, including Russia’s Zvezda, which has been the site of a number of minor air leaks in recent months.
According to Reuters, there was a shift in severity detected on Friday that caused the amount of oxygen leaking from it to double, a development that caused some international bickering and led to NASA ordering all but two of the Russian cosmonauts to board the SpaceX vessel and prepare for a potential evacuation.
Sources told the outlet the order stemmed from a disagreement between the folks at NASA and those at Roscosmos, its Russian equivalent, as the former objected to the latter’s plan to “use a saw to break into an area” where the air was leaking in order to address the crack.
The astronauts who took what is referred to as a “safe-haven measure” were permitted to return to the ISS around two hours later after the agencies agreed to an alternate plan, and they stressed there is no immediate danger to the people aboard or the space station itself.
This marks the seventh time a safe-haven order has been issued since 2009 (the most recent was in 2024), although they usually stem from potential collisions with space debris. None of them have ended in an actual evacuation back to Earth, and here’s to hoping that doesn’t end up changing in the future.