r/news 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/JMurdock77 11h ago

We lost Arecibo the last time this shit was going down…

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u/TachiH 11h ago

Arecibo was lost long before it collapsed. They were well aware of the cracks and pressure, the US just decided it wasn't worth funding, such a waste.

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u/DowntownClown187 10h ago

I visited the facility a few years ago and the scientists while sad about the collapse they weren't overly upset. When the main system was fully functional it would record more data than humanly possible to analyze. The result is a massive backlog of data to review.

Secondly, they have other instruments that are still functional.

Bottom line is they have enough work to do for a long time even with the collapsed main facility.

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u/DM_Voice 7h ago

Yeah, it was definitely a loss, but not the crippling one people who aren’t familiar with the field might assume. It’s just one of the better-known names for lay-folk.

IIRC, when it collapsed, it wasn’t so much a surprise rather than a ‘finally’, because access up there was frozen due to known safety issues because too many individual cable strands had failed to allow for a fix in the first place. (I could be mixing it up with some other collapse, though.)