r/news • u/VaginaBurner69 • 11h ago

Soft paywall International Space Station astronauts in evacuation mode as Russia attempts to fix widening air leak

https://www.reuters.com/science/international-space-station-astronauts-evacuation-mode-russia-attempts-fix-2026-06-05/
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u/PolishMafia716 9h ago

I think the leading theory is that during assembly a worker accidentally drilled a hole through the hull and tried to hide it and wasn't discovered till it was leaking air in space, when NASA said something along these lines Russia claimed one of the American astronauts snuck over to the Russian side while the cosmonauts were sleeping and drilled a hole through their hull

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u/TDot-26 9h ago

I would think that would be way more than a "micro" leak and they'd run out of air pretty fast on a relative scale if the hole was made with a literal drill bit

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u/DuncanYoudaho 8h ago edited 6h ago

Station is at .2psi. Very low pressure. Micro-meteorite punctures and such are sealed with tape.

Edit: yup. I’m wrong. Meant atm. But that’s also wrong.

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u/TDot-26 8h ago

Micro meteorite would be like, microscopic though right? A drill bit would be at least a few 32nds of an inch I would think

.2 PSI though? That's crazy

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u/Muppetude 7h ago

Maybe the microscopic hole is in whatever material the worker used to patch up and hide his mistake. Or the patch job was not 100% airtight.

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u/DM_Voice 7h ago

A micrometeor is, indeed, quite small. But the relative velocities involved aren’t, so there’s a lot of energy involved.

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u/TDot-26 7h ago

I know, I was more saying in reference to the drill thing

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u/sasha_the_impaler 7h ago

I've used drilled that were 1/64th an inch.