“Deeply concerned.” Members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an independent committee created to advise NASA on safety issues, expressed that they were “deeply concerned” over the aging space station at a public meeting on April 17.
“The ISS has entered the riskiest period of its existence,” Rich Williams, a member of the panel, said, according to Space News. Williams wasn’t referring to new problems, but rather to the buildup of technical problems and budget deficits that now pose a critical threat to the space station’s operations.
Leaks that don’t close. One of the most persistent problems involves the leaks in Russian Zvezda module. Specifically, in a vestibule named PrK that connects the main module to a docking port.
The cracks were detected in 2019, but the loss of air has continued to increase since then, reaching its highest level in April 2024. Despite years of joint investigation between NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, there’s still not a clear solution to the problem or a consensus over the root cause of the leaks.
A meeting in Moscow. The NASA panel considers the leaks to be “one of our highest concerns” about the ISS. It’s classified it with a risk level of “5 out of 5,” the most serious, since August 2024.
Williams pointed out that there’s a scheduled meeting in Moscow this month to discuss new mitigation strategies to deal with the leaks. For now, space agencies have limited the repressurization of the affected vestibule and are keeping the hatch that connects it to the rest of the station closed.
Fear of an unexpected fall. As of now, officials plan to retire the International Space Station in 2030 or 2031. NASA has asked SpaceX to develop a special U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) to haul the ISS towards the Pacific Ocean, where it can reentry the atmosphere safely.
The safety panel notes that there’s currently no emergency plan to deorbit the ISS before this deorbit vehicle is ready.
“If there is a deorbit of the ISS before the USDV is delivered, the risk to the public from ISS breakup debris will increase by orders of magnitude,” Williams said.
Importantly, we’re talking about a structure that weighs approximately 450 tons.
Other signs of age. Besides these primary concerns, we also have to consider the lack of replacement parts. Maintaining enough spare parts for critical systems, such as life support, has become harder with the passage of time. Some components are almost 30 years old, and the original suppliers no longer exist.
Furthermore, the space suits designed for extravehicle activity, some of which were designed in the ‘70s, are also experiencing problems. In June 2024, officials canceled a planned spacewalk due to a coolant leak over concerns that it could cause a repeat of the 2013 incident where astronaut Luca Parmitano almost drowned when his helmet started filling up with water.
In addition, there are also issues with the space shuttles that supply the ISS, such as the thruster failure of Boeing’s Starliner, the “toxic” smell from the Russian Progress MS-29 spacecraft, the delays of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, and the cancelation of the Cygnus NG-223 Northrop Grumman mission over the damages suffered during the ship’s transport.
It all comes down to money. According to the ASAP, all of these risks have one common denominator: “Overarching all of these risks is a large ISS budget shortfall.” Although the expert panel didn’t detail the exact nature of the shortfall, data shows a slight reduction in the ISS’ operations and maintenance budget (from roughly $1 billion in 2023 to $993 million in 2024).
In its annual report last year, the panel had already cautioned that the cost of the deorbit vehicle and the financing of future commercial space stations could exert pressure on NASA’s capacity to carry out the ISS’ normal and contingency operations. As a solution, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk proposed deorbiting the station earlier, in 2027.
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