NASA ordered the four astronauts of its Crew-12 mission on the International Space Station to get inside their docked Crew Dragon spacecraft and put on spacesuits on Friday morning, preparing them for a possible emergency evacuation as a leak worsened aboard the orbital outpost.
The command went out at 9.04am ET, or 2pm BST, and covered two US astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut already living and working together on the station. The order was blunt: move into the capsule, suit up and be ready to leave if the situation changed fast.
That step came while a Russian crew was still trying to fix the air leak in the station’s Russian segment. NASA described the problem as worsening, which is why the safety posture changed from monitoring to evacuation preparation. The Crew Dragon was already docked to the station when the order was issued, giving the astronauts a ready escape route if the leak could not be contained.
The timing matters because the station had not yet declared a full evacuation, but mission control was acting as though one might become necessary. That is the friction in this story: the repair effort was still under way even as NASA told the crew to move toward the hatch and treat the spacecraft as their lifeline. It is the sort of order that turns a maintenance problem into an operational one in a matter of minutes.
For readers tracking the station’s persistent pressure issues, the moment recalls earlier reporting on the Russian segment’s leaks, including a previous warning that the International Space Station Russian segment was leaking again. The difference on Friday was the immediacy of the response. The four Crew-12 astronauts were not being briefed for a future contingency; they were told at once to be ready for one.
What happens next depends on the repair crew’s work, but the immediate answer is clear: NASA chose caution over calm, and the astronauts stayed inside their Crew Dragon with spacesuits on in case the leak forced them to leave the Space Station without delay.
