ISS is still leaking air after latest repair efforts fail

The International Space Station (ISS) is still leaking air from the Russian segment of the outpost despite efforts to eliminate the losses.

Sergey Krikalev, executive director of the Human Space Flight Program at the Russian space agency Roscosmos, made the admission during the pre-launch news conference for NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 mission.

The leaks were first detected in 2019 and, despite multiple efforts to locate and repair them, the ISS is still losing air. The crew is not in any danger, but cracks in the aging structure are less than ideal. In October 2024, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogenson told The Register that one option was to seal off the affected section of the ISS – a NASA report [PDF] stated that the leaks were in the Service Module Transfer Tunnel. Permanently sealing off the area would result in the loss of a Russian docking port.

While not disastrous for operations onboard ...