“The station is not young,” stated Michael Barratt, a NASA astronaut who returned from the spaceport station last month. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that.”

“The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are,” stated Cabana, who was the senior civil servant at NASA till his retirement in 2023. “And the United States thinks that it’s not safe, however we can’t show that to the Russian complete satisfaction that that’s the case.

“So while the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic,” Cabana stated. “And NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”

Closing the PrK hatch completely would remove making use of among the spaceport station’s 4 Russian docking ports.

NASA has actually chartered a group of independent specialists to evaluate the fractures and leakages and assist figure out the origin, Cabana stated. “This is an engineering problem, and good engineers should be able to agree on it.”

As a safety measure, Barratt stated spaceport station teams are likewise closing the hatch separating the United States and Russian areas of the spaceport station when cosmonauts are operating in the PrK.

“The way it’s affected us, mostly, is as they go in and open that to unload a cargo vehicle that’s docked to it, they’ve also taken time to inspect and try to repair when they can,” Barratt stated. “We’ve taken an extremely conservative technique to closing the hatch in between the United States side and the Russian side for those period.

“It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides, and it’s something that we as a crew live with and adapt.”