Nasa had directed five of the seven astronauts to shelter inside the docked SpaceX Crew Dragon “Freedom” spacecraft while two Russian cosmonauts attempted an urgent repair.
At this point Russia should just join China’s Tiangong and let the westoids choke to death in space. They call for their wholesome astronauterinos to shelter, while leaving the barbaric cosmonauts do the repairs, and of course, they had to take shelter in a cringy named, privately contracted (because state owned space agencies are le bad) spacecraft that’s supposed to pwn the russkies.
The leak was on a Russian module, so they fixed it and had everyone else get out of the way. And besides, space x has like 80% of all launched mass to orbit, so if anyone’s being the less useful partner here it’s Russia. Soviet spaceflight was very advanced, with Sputnik, Vostok, and Mir being huge leaps forward in tech. The Russian space program is just the scraps of that. Let’s not let the Americans being evil get in the way of recognizing reality here.
The specific station module with the leaks, Zvezda, is one of the oldest modules. It actually started construction in the 1980s as a Mir flight spare and then was repurposed as the core module of the never-built Mir 2 space station. It can’t be replaced even if there was time before the 2030 ISS retirement date to design and build one. If Zvezda fails earlier than that, we could see that retirement date come sooner.
