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Officials first noticed a leak last September, but they didn't do anything about it for nearly a year, since the leak wasn't major. Plus, station operations like space walks and crew exchanges kept crew members too busy to collect enough data about the issue. Recently, however, technicians detected an increase to the already elevated leak rate. So NASA announced on August 20 that the three men aboard the station – NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner – would begin a hunt for the source. That search is "taking longer than expected," NASA spokesman Daniel...

NASA is tracking down the source of a minor air leak on the International Space Station. Crewmembers of the station's current Expedition 63 are in no immediate danger and will spend the weekend in the orbiting laboratory's Russian segment, inside the Zvezda service module, NASA officials said in an update today (Aug. 20). Astronauts can work in a shirtsleeve environment inside the station, but the orbiting lab is never completely airtight; a little bit of air always leaks over time, requiring routine repressurization from nitrogen tanks that are sent up during cargo missions, NASA added in the update. This leak...

Amid reports that the Russians will keep the cause of an air leak discovered at the International Space Station in 2018 secret, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has promised to speak personally with the head of the Russian space agency. "They have not told me anything," Bridenstine said during a Houston energy conference question session Thursday (Sept. 19), according to the Houston Chronicle. But he emphasized that he wants to keep good relations with the Russians, one of the two chief partners on the orbiting complex. "I don't want to let one item set [the relationship] back, but it is clearly...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A poorly designed flexible air hose used by one too many astronauts as a makeshift handhold caused the recent air leak at the International Space Station, NASA's top station manager said Friday. Analysis shows that a hole about one-tenth of an inch in diameter popped open at one end of the metallic hose in late December and started the slow leak that took controllers a couple of weeks to detect, and the astronauts to find and repair. Nearly two weeks later air pressure is almost back to normal inside the orbiting outpost and the quality of...