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The International Space Station has been leaking air since 2019, but a worsening of the situation prompted an evacuation order from NASA last week. Fortunately, it only lasted a few hours, and the astronauts were able to resume their duties without incident.
The ISS orbits about 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, so where exactly does one go when evacuating a space station? The answer is: Into the attached spaceship. Four SpaceX crew members and one NASA astronaut were forced to spend part of Friday morning sealed up in the SpaceX Dragon for part of the morning.
There was no immediate danger of catastrophic decompression from the leak. However, the worsening rate of air loss forced inspection and repair work that, if it had gone wrong, could have created bigger problems within the station. The temporary evacuation was, therefore, a precautionary measure in case of such an accident.
Russian space agency Roscosmos is taking responsibility for dealing with the leak, which exists in its portion of the station. Specifically, there are small cracks in the transfer tunnel to and from the Zvezda service module.
The worsening of the leak was discovered earlier in the week by Roscosmos crew during cargo operations involving the Progress 95 spacecraft. The necessary repairs involved cutting through a bracket that was obstructing access to the affected area, which is what caused NASA to instruct its crew to seek “safe haven” in the Dragon.
To date, however, the leak itself has not been repaired, as Roscosmos continues to collect data on the problem.
Space Station Air Loss is at a Manageable Rate
Even at the new, higher rate of loss, the leak is not in itself an emergency. NASA says the station is now losing air to space at a rate of two pounds per day.
The station’s internal capacity is roughly 1000 cubic meters, which equates to about 2,640 pounds of air. Without replacement, then, the station’s pressure would be dropping by a little less than 0.1% daily.
Fortunately, the station can produce its own oxygen through the electrolysis of water. Still, any mass lost to space ultimately needs replacing, since it’s impossible to create something out of nothing — and space is full of nothing. Each pound of air lost from the station needs to be replaced by pressurized tanks flown up from Earth.
That isn’t cheap. The costs of transporting material up to the station run into the tens of thousands of dollars per pound. There is, in a sense, money leaking out through those cracks in the transfer tunnel.
At the same time, the annualized cost of the ISS is around $11.5 billion. Or, as a day rate, $31 million. Put in that context, the cost of the leak is a rounding error, which may explain why the agencies are in no huge rush to fix it.
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Sea Cucumbers Have ‘Zombie’ Flesh
Sea cucumbers, already one of the strangest organisms in the ocean, have been found to have the remarkable property that their body parts can go on living independently, without either dying or regenerating into a new creature. A PhD oceanography student in Newfoundland made the discovery after noticing that leftover bits of her experimental subject were not decomposing as expected.
In fact, they went on living for over three years, appearing to filter nutrients from the surrounding water, heal themselves as if they were still part of the organism, and fend off the bacteria that would ordinarily cause decomposition. Attempting to replicate the result with other sea creatures, Sara Jobson found some signs of similar behavior, but only up to a few months. Only the sea cucumber’s flesh seemed to be effectively immortal.
Telegram Chatter About Energy Foretells Conflict
A pair of independent researchers have developed a Geopolitical Risk index by applying natural language processing algorithms to “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) channels on the encrypted messaging service Telegram. Their goal was to look for indicators that would predict movements in the stock market — a role that traditional news media once served, but has become too slow for in the digital era.
Of the topical categories their CausalAlpha algorithm scans for, political instability and the energy industry were those that correlated with impending discussion of conflict. Conflict, in turn, correlated with some of the economic impacts one would expect: an uptick for defense industry stocks and a downturn for most others. It’s unsurprising that instability would precede conflict, but the fact that energy discussions precede conflict is both interesting and telling.
Image Credit: NASA/Roscosmos (license)
