Axiom manned flight to ISS rescheduled; NASA attempts to clarify ISS leak situation
In a NASA update today, it announced a new launch date of June 19, 2025 for Axiom’s fourth manned flight to ISS while also attempting to clarify ISS leak situation that caused this last and more extended delay.
On June 12, NASA and Axiom Space delayed the mission as the agency continued to work with Roscosmos to understand the most recent repair efforts to seal small leaks. The leaks, located in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, have been monitored by flight controllers for the past few years.
Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed. Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station. By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda.
It appears, though NASA doesn’t say so directly, that the Russians did not wish to change the situation at ISS with another docking — even if it was a docking on the American half of the station — while it was evaluating these leak repairs. It now appears they have gotten enough data to allow NASA to set a new launch date later this week.
If the repairs have managed to stop the leaks this is excellent news. At the same time, it doesn’t reduce the risks of a catastrophic failure of Zvezda, since the existence of these numerous stress fractures in its hull suggest a chronic long term failure that can only worsen with time.
The sudden delay of Axiom’s AX-4 last week also indicates poor coordination between NASA and Roscosmos. It was as if NASA had no idea the repair work was occurring, either because it wasn’t paying attention to what the Russians were doing or because the Russians had kept this work secret until it was completed. In either case, this is not how such a partnership should operate.
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In a NASA update today, it announced a new launch date of June 19, 2025 for Axiom’s fourth manned flight to ISS while also attempting to clarify ISS leak situation that caused this last and more extended delay.
On June 12, NASA and Axiom Space delayed the mission as the agency continued to work with Roscosmos to understand the most recent repair efforts to seal small leaks. The leaks, located in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, have been monitored by flight controllers for the past few years.
Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed. Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station. By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda.
It appears, though NASA doesn’t say so directly, that the Russians did not wish to change the situation at ISS with another docking — even if it was a docking on the American half of the station — while it was evaluating these leak repairs. It now appears they have gotten enough data to allow NASA to set a new launch date later this week.
If the repairs have managed to stop the leaks this is excellent news. At the same time, it doesn’t reduce the risks of a catastrophic failure of Zvezda, since the existence of these numerous stress fractures in its hull suggest a chronic long term failure that can only worsen with time.
The sudden delay of Axiom’s AX-4 last week also indicates poor coordination between NASA and Roscosmos. It was as if NASA had no idea the repair work was occurring, either because it wasn’t paying attention to what the Russians were doing or because the Russians had kept this work secret until it was completed. In either case, this is not how such a partnership should operate.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
It’s difficult to avoid the impression of two space agencies trapped in this flying machine. Trapped by their own political imperatives — imperatives that require some dissembling not only with their own votaries and stakeholders, but with each other, too.
Of course, human spaceflight programs have been political creations right from the very start. As Charles Murray once put it, Kennedy’s decision to adopt Apollo “was a completely political—almost cynical—decision.” The only difference between the American and Soviet programs of the 60’s and those which have been adopted since is that they were mission driven programs, rather than vendor driven programs.
And the International Space Station has been notoriously so. In the 80’s, it was a way to keep certain rice bowls filled while keeping pace with the Soviets at a cost and risk level that American political leadership could accept. In the 1990’s, the rice bowl imperative remained but the others shifted to saving both Boris Yeltsin’s regime and its talented aerospace engineers from much more dangerous fates. In the 2000’s, the Bush administration’s taming of ISS’s spiraling costs and the subsequent urgency of retiring the Shuttle changed the imperative again to increased reliance on the Russians for not only lifeboat capability but even crew transport for an extended time.
Today, however, all these imperatives but the rice bowls have dissipated. Instead, both agencies now desperately hug the station tightly as their only viable human spaceflight program, with the NASA replacement(s) repeatedly delayed and any Russian replacement more or less impossible due to collapsing funding and capability. To admit that this project is now becoming rapidly untenable would come at a political cost neither wants to pay. The situation is worse for the Russians, of course, thanks not just to the absence of a vibrant commercial space industry but also thanks to the constraints that dictatorships must operate under along with the eternal Russian sense of inferiority.
So they dissemble to us, and they dissemble to each other. But neither knows what else to do. And the theater goes on, until the station itself forces the performance to conclude.
Well said.
It’s difficult to estimate how much of the ostentatious bonhomie displayed aboard ISS whenever a new crew arrives is real and how much is not, but we now have at least an approximate target date for when that ceases to be an issue. Unless, of course, the ISS, itself, takes a hand before that.