“This station is not young,” said NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, who returned from the space station last month. “It’s been there for quite some time, so you would expect some wear and tear, but we’re seeing it.”
“The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but we cannot demonstrate to their satisfaction that it is safe,” said Kavanagh, who served as a senior NASA official until his retirement in 2023. ” he said. “And the United States believes it is unsafe,” but cannot prove that is the case until Russia is satisfied.
“As such, the Russian team continues to search and seal the leak, but we do not believe a catastrophic collapse of PrK is realistic,” Kavanagh said. “And NASA has expressed concerns about PrK’s structural integrity and the potential for catastrophic failure.”
Permanently closing the PrK hatch would render one of the space station’s four Russian docking ports unusable.
Kavanagh said NASA sent a team of independent experts to evaluate the cracks and leaks and determine the root cause. “This is an engineering problem, and any good engineer would agree.”
Barratt said that as a precaution, the space station crew also closed the hatch separating the U.S. and Russian sections of the space station while astronauts were working on PrK.
“What is impacting us is primarily when we go in and open up a parked freight vehicle to unload it. We also take the time to inspect it and try to repair it where possible. ,” Barratt said. “We have taken a very conservative approach during that period to close the hatch between the American side and the Russian side.
“It’s not a comfortable thing to do, but it’s the best agreement between smart people on both sides, and it’s something our crew will accept and adapt to.”
