Cracks are appearing on the International Space Station, and retired NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd says they’re a “fairly serious issue.”
After Russian cosmonauts spotted the cracks on the station’s Zarya module, Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the Russian segment of the ISS, publicly revealed the discovery in August. The cracks don’t pose a danger to astronauts at this time, NASA says, and the agency told Insider last month that nobody had identified “new potential leak sites” on the station.
But in a House committee hearing on Tuesday, Shepherd told Congressional representatives that “there are probably other cracks we haven’t found yet.”
“As far as I know, the Russian engineers and the NASA engineers — they’ve analyzed it — they don’t exactly understand why these cracks are appearing now,” Shepherd said.
SOURCE: https://www.businessinsider.com/cracks-on-space-station-serious-former-nasa-astronaut-2021-9