ISS air leak forces 5 astronauts into SpaceX Crew Dragon safe haven

Five of the seven International Space Station crew members took shelter inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft Friday morning as two Russian cosmonauts worked on a stubborn air leak in the Russian segment. NASA directed US astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev—who launched together on the Crew-12 mission—to board the Dragon capsule around 9 am EST. NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who arrived via Soyuz, joined them. Mission control ordered “Emergency Procedure 3.4: Crew Dragon, establish Safe Haven” out of an “abundance of caution” while Roscosmos performed repairs on the PrK transfer tunnel at the back of Russia’s Zvezda Service Module.

The PrK tunnel leads to a docking port for Progress cargo ships and has been leaking for over five years due to microscopic cracks. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev attempted structural repairs but quickly switched to taking measurements only. After about 90 minutes, NASA cleared the crew to re-enter the station. Roscosmos paused the repair effort to assess data, and NASA emphasized a collaborative approach going forward. The tunnel is normally kept sealed and at lower pressure to isolate the leak; cosmonauts pressurize it when they need access. NASA has not provided details on why the repair was deemed risky enough to order the shelter-in-place maneuver.