“ISS Leaks are Basically Becoming an Expensive, Zero-G Air Conditioner — And NASA is Losing Sleep Over It”

Let’s talk about the ISS: humanity’s big floating apartment complex in space, more than two decades old and more patched up than your grandpa’s fishing boat. While that’s cruising above Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour, the Russian segment of this orbital Airbnb has some unwanted ‘ventilation’ issues. In layman terms, it is leaking. And spoiler alert-it has been leaking for about five years now.

Let’s plunge in. Back in 2019, NASA and Roscosmos noticed that a portion of the ISS was suspiciously drafty. Well, turns out, this wasn’t some harmless space ghost, but real honest-to-goodness leaks. Fast forward to the present day, and we have **four cracks**, innumerable patch jobs, and **50 other ‘areas of concern’** which NASA’s inspectors have quaintly grouped together as “high-risk.” On NASA’s scale of one to five, these leaks hit a perfect “five.” Imagine winning a contest you never wanted to enter — yup, that’s ISS right now.

What to say, however, to our friends at Roscosmos, who have been trying to patch over these cracks with covers over them-literally, nothing more and nothing less than “space-grade band-aids.” But these leaks just keep popping back up, like a nagging relative during the holidays. These cracks are on the Russian…