There was a minor panic in low-Earth orbit last week when flight controllers for the International Space Station (ISS) noticed that air was slowly leaking away into space. The six astronauts on board were instructed to put aside all other work and trace the leak.
They found a two-millimetre hole in a Soyuz capsule docked with the ISS and sealed it up 鈥� but now some are saying that the hole could have been deliberate sabotage.
Thought the hole is tiny, if left unfixed it would have leaked all of the air in the ISS away in just 18 days. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, set up a special commission to investigate the leak.
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At first it seemed the most likely explanation was an unfortunate encounter with a tiny meteorite, but now the mystery has deepened: the hole seems to have come from inside the station.
Sabotage in space?
In a photo (above) that NASA released and has since deleted, the hole looks strikingly like it came from a power drill. 鈥淚t was done by a human hand 鈥� there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface,鈥� Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin told Russian news agency TASS.
He said that the special commission will continue to investigate and find out who drilled the hole, and whether it was an accident.
鈥淲e have already ruled out the meteorite version,鈥� Rogozin said. 鈥淲e are checking the Earth version. But there is another version that we do not rule out: deliberate interference in space.鈥�
Maxim Surayev, a Russian politician and former cosmonaut, speculated that a member of the ISS crew who wanted to go back to Earth may have drilled the hole.
鈥淲e鈥檙e all human, and anyone might want to go home, but this method is really low,鈥� he told Russian news agency RIA Novosti. 鈥淚f a cosmonaut pulled this strange stunt 鈥� and that can鈥檛 be ruled out 鈥� it鈥檚 really bad.鈥�
But the simplest explanation is that it was a manufacturing mistake that nobody caught until it started to make trouble.
Shoddy workmanship
鈥淭o me, the speculations of sabotage sound like a desperate stretch to avoid implicating Russian space program workmanship,鈥� says Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 鈥淚t feeds into this more general impression that quality control in the Russian space program is poor.鈥�
In particular, the mechanical failures of several Russian Proton rockets since 2007 have raised concerns that the program鈥檚 quality control measures are not stringent enough.
In the US any concerns about the safety of an aircraft or spacecraft can be reported anonymously, reducing incentives to keep a mistake, like an accidentally misplaced drill hole, quiet.
That鈥檚 not so in the Russian space programme, which might encourage workers to slap some glue over the hole and say nothing to avoid being fired, McDowell says.
These issues may be a problem for cooperation between the US and Russia in space, a relationship that鈥檚 already been strained due to the current precarious diplomatic situation on the ground.
At the moment, NASA is not able to fly its own astronauts to space, instead relying on Russian vehicles. That deal is due to expire next year, by which point NASA hopes that commercial spacecraft provided by SpaceX and Boeing will pick up the slack.
鈥淚 think at the political level it will accelerate the desire to get the commercial crew going and get us off our dependency on the Russian vehicles,鈥� says McDowell. 鈥淚f it can happen once, it can happen again, and maybe in a more vital place.鈥�