NASA say they are totally fine that the International Space Station is physically deteriorating. In fact, it had been pointed out that there were significant cracks and air leaks in a segment of the tunnel leading to the Russian portion of the space station. Worse yet, they appear to have increased in severity and are leaking more air than ever before.
And according to the Washington Post, both a spokesperson for the agency and their associate administrator (identified as James Free) downplayed the gravity of the cracks and leaks. I guess they probably think it's normal for the ISS to take a lot of wear and tear.
Currently, it's unclear what exactly has caused the leaks on the supposedly Russian side of the ISS – but Roscosmos (the Russian version of NASA) having purportedly identified a whopping 50 "areas of concern" are patching them up as they go along, said NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton.
She also noted that the problematic areas have not been "confirmed to be cracks" and could simply be "benign imperfections that could be typically seen on a surface, like a small scratch".
Still, with the ISS spending ten years longer in space than it was ever supposed to, it serves everybody's interests to do regular risk assessments and undertake remedial work as warranted.
On Thursday, they stormed into the last eight when they dumped the Dutch-Ukraine combination of Kirsten de Wit-Mariia Stokiarenko 21-10, 21-11 in Round 2.
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