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September 5, 2018 07:00 am

Russia Thinks Someone With a Drill Caused the Recent ISS Air Leak

Last week, NASA discovered a small pressure leak on the International Space Station. U.S. and Russian crew members managed to trace the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle and patch it with epoxy. The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris, but Russian news outlets are reporting that the problem was a manufacturing defect. "It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional," reports Ars Technica. "There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test." "We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will." From the report: NASA spokesman Dan Huot, based in Houston where the space station program is managed, deferred all comment on the issue to Roscosmos. The spacecraft was manufactured by Energia, a Russian corporation. A former employee of the company who is now a professor at Moscow State University told another Russian publication that these kinds of incidents have occurred before at Energia. "I have conducted investigations of all kinds of spacecraft, and after landing, we discovered a hole drilled completely through the hull of a re-entry module," the former Energia employee, Viktor Minenko, said in Gazeta.RU. "But the technician didn't report the defect to anyone but sealed up the hole with epoxy. We found the person, and after a commotion he was terminated," said Minenko. In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.

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