A pesky air leak on the International Space Station (ISS) just won\u2019t quit. Although the crew hoped they had sealed the last crack on the Russian module, long-term observations revealed that the ISS is still leaking air.<\/p>\n
During a recent press conference, a Roscosmos official told reporters that recent attempts to fix the leak have slowed down the rate of air leaving the space station but that it\u2019s not yet completely sealed. \u201cThe leak is ongoing,\u201d Russian news agency TASS reported<\/a>. \u201cWe continue our efforts to find and fix it, with the recent repairs having seriously reduced the rate of air leakage,\u201d Sergey Krikalyov, the executive director of manned space programs at Roscosmos, told reporters on Wednesday. \u201cFor some time we even thought that we had found the last crack and sealed it, though long-term observations have shown that it continues.\u201d<\/p>\n Roscosmos first reported the leak in September 2019, tracing it to the vestibule (named PrK) that connects a docking port to the Russian Zvezda module, which the space agency had launched to low Earth orbit in July 2000. Over the past six years, the rate at which the air is leaking doubled from one pound a day to a little over two pounds a day<\/a>, according to a report released in 2024. That led NASA to elevate the leak to the highest level of risk. At the time, it was reported that\u00a0NASA and Roscosmos could not agree on the root cause of the leak<\/a>\u00a0or a way to fix it.<\/p>\n