Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway received a disturbing call last Friday, June 5. It was 9:04 a.m. on the east coast and the authorities at the Houston space control center transmitted precise orders. The call was not routine. NASA’s instructions were clear: the five astronauts who depend on the agency and live on the International Space Station (ISS) had to put on pressurized suits, move inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom capsule and prepare for possible evacuation.
Houston activated the “reinforced security” “safe haven” protocol, which entails preparing for a possible re-entry on Earth: getting into the ship that has taken them to space, docked at the station, in case they have to flee to save their lives. Until now, on the rare occasions that this protocol has been activated, the risk it was space junkwhich travels at such speed that, if it hits one of the modules, it can cause a catastrophe. But on this occasion, the trigger was not an external danger, but distrust.
Meir and Hathaway are American astronauts and, together with the French Sophie Adenot, from the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Russian cosmonaut from Roscosmos Andrey Fedyaev, they make up the mission crew. SpaceX Crew-12which is destined for the ISS, the large international laboratory that orbits 400 kilometers from our planet. The orders also affected another American astronaut, Chris Williams, who has been on the station for more than six months sharing the narrow space corridors with two other Russian cosmonauts.
The United States activated the protocol after an anomaly was detected in two air leaks during the pressurization of the transfer chamber of the Russian Zvezda service module, which serves as a connection to the rest of the Russian facilities on the station. These cracks have been known since 2019 and from 2024 the two powers They disagree about the seriousness of the problem. But in recent weeks the amount of air leaking has doubled, alerting engineers.
The American authorities raised the alarm when two of the Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, decided to repair the leak by cutting a small metal support of the duct with a saw “to better access an area for a more detailed inspection” with the aim of later sealing it with a special biocomponent. The maneuver “could have increased the risk to the structure in that area,” NASA explained.
While the Russians worked on their part of the station, the American astronauts took refuge in their own ship: the United States did not agree with this decision and did not trust the result.
Meir, Hathaway and the rest of the astronauts remained in the Dragon module; They waited for two hours canned and with their suits on. When Roscosmos decided it would not cut any components and would, for now, only apply sealant to one of the suspected leak points, NASA ordered them back to their posts. “Roscosmos has suspended Friday’s structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, while further measurements and data are evaluated,” NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote on the X social network. “We look forward to collaborating with Roscosmos to jointly address the leaks,” she noted.
Roscosmos downplayed the incident. “The situation does not threaten the safety of the crew or the systems on board,” the Russian agency reported on Friday night. “The pressure on board the ISS is stable and remains at the calculated level.”
It was the most critical moment for coexistence in space between Russians and Americans since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukrainewhich caused the cancellation of numerous space projects in which both blocks collaborated. But here, for the first time, the misgivings between the two space powers broke out like a fight between roommates who can’t stand each other. They have four years of coexistence left until the projected decommissioning of the ISS in 2030 and, above all, everyone’s life depends on them being able to maintain balance: it is cooperation based on dependence, not trust. The station operates as a hybrid system: Russia controls the propulsion and the US controls most of the systems, making it almost impossible to separate the two segments of the station.
Although astronauts from the two countries maintain a close collaborative relationship, the gap between space authorities seems to widen every day. Cultural, procedural and structural differences become evident when relations between the two countries cool. Moscow has seen its resources depleted since it attacked kyiv in February 2022. The tensions of the moment led Roscosmos to threaten to drop on Europe the station, the size of a football field. With weakened accounts, Moscow’s priorities are not in space.
The change in the global geopolitical chessboard is also bringing Russia and China closer together, which has its own agenda of space projects. Moscow has had to alter plans for its own platform, the Russian Space Station (RSE). When announcing it in 2015, President Putin highlighted that only 5% of Russia could be seen from the ISS. “From our national station we will be able to see the entire territory of our vast country,” he stated then.
Beyond the air leak incident, the days of the International Space Station are numbered. Three years ago, the partners participating in the largest planetary space cooperation project (the United States, Japan, Canada and the EU) agreed to extend the platform’s operations until 2030. Russia assures that it will abandon the project a couple of years before, although it has been threatening to withdraw earlier for years. The Space Station has been inhabited continuously for nearly 27 years of its existence, but last week’s incident was about to change that history and precipitate the end of Russian collaboration. The two years difference between NASA and Roscosmos planning are generating a lot of discussion. Russian disconnection from the ISS will not be easy because they maintain shared resources and common operations that depend on them. Without their participation, space infrastructure is destined to disappear or wander through space.
Friday was not the first time that a crack caused concern on the space platform. A few weeks ago a space flight in which the first astronauts from India, Poland and Hungary were going to travel was postponed due to leaks. Russia has never managed to solve this problem despite the fact that it has been recurring for seven years, as Houston recalled, insisting that it threatens to degenerate even more due to metal fatigue. NASA’s inspector general has described the situation of the Russian module as “a security risk of the first order.” In several internal documents of the space agency, “catastrophic failure” is mentioned to refer to successive incidents of the Russian module.
The Russian space agency first reported a leak in this module four years after its useful life expired, in September 2019. It was never fully repaired: astronauts noticed its existence again in 2020 by observing the floating leaves of a tea bag, and in July 2025, Roscosmos deputy director of manned programs, Sergei Krikalev, declared that the leak had decreased, but not stopped completely.
“If the country decides to extend the useful life of the Russian segment of the International Space Station beyond 2025, a chain of failures in numerous components will begin,” former Russian cosmonaut and academic Vladimir Soloviov warned in 2020.
Stifled by cuts, the Russian plan now, or at least its “main possible scenario,” according to Roscosmos, is to use the modules of the International Space Station as an initial base, including the ancient Zvezdá, which by then will add 13 years beyond its useful life. The agency plans for the first segment of the EER to join the Russian part of the space platform and separate before its destruction in 2028.
“This will ensure, among other things, the continuity of scientific experiments in orbit,” the deputy director of manned flights, Sergei Krikalev, said last year as justification for this patch. The objective of Russian scientists is to take advantage, above all, of the Nauka module, sent to the International Space Station in 2021 together with the European Robotic Arm.
The EER, spiritual successor to Mir, is the last opportunity for the Russian space agency to try to recover the prestige gained in Soviet times, more than 35 years ago. A US crew has just circled the Moon, and China and India have landed on the satellite, but Moscow’s return with the probe Moon-25 In 2023 it was a failure when it crashed on its surface. This imbalance and the tense relations between the two countries have seven astronauts sharing a flat in the worst possible scenario, in which their lives depend on increasingly complicated cooperation.
