This hypothesis was expressed by the Russian cosmonaut Ivan Wagner, who returned from orbit.
A gradual leakage of air through a crack on board the ISS may indicate that the space station has already exhausted its resource and requires the intervention of specialists.
The air leak, which the crews of several expeditions to the ISS have been looking for since 2019, may be caused by a crack in the station's hull, which arose due to its service life. This scenario was expressed by the participant of the 63rd long-term expedition to the ISS, who returned to Earth, and whose members managed to find the place of the leak, the Russian cosmonaut Ivan Wagner.
“20 years - in fact, it is now a record for all space stations absolutely. And we see now that something is changing, something requires more attention. Again, if we return to the leak, the case is already somewhere beginning to give scratches, cracks, that is, we see the limits of the ISS design resource, "Ivan Wagner quoted TASS as saying.
At the same time, his colleague, Russian Anatoly Ivanishin, considers it premature to call the place of the air leak a crack. According to him, this is too loud a statement for
“What we see is, I would describe it as a scratch. I am not inclined to use the word crack, because we do not see deep into the structure of the metal. This scratch is several cm long, about 2-3 cm. My understanding is that Energia specialists are working on this issue and do not want to rush. And they are working on a systematic solution to this issue. This is not Kapton tape, something more serious. But it’s too early to talk about it,”Anatoly Ivanishin said.
Recall that in mid-October 2020, the crew of the 63rd long-term expedition to the ISS finally managed to localize an air leak discovered a year ago. It was recorded in September 2019, and at the end of August this year, its speed doubled - from 270 to 540 grams per day. In September 2020, the rate of leakage increased to 1.4 kilograms of air per day, which required a detailed examination of the ISS and made it possible to find out that the problem was in the Russian Zvezda module, which was originally suggested by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) …