{"id":128056,"date":"2021-09-24T10:24:31","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T17:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/astronaut-who-helped-build-space-station-says-damage-is-serious"},"modified":"2021-09-24T10:24:31","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T17:24:31","slug":"astronaut-who-helped-build-space-station-says-damage-is-serious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/astronaut-who-helped-build-space-station-says-damage-is-serious","title":{"rendered":"Astronaut Who Helped Build Space Station Says Damage Is \u201cSerious\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The space station has been showing its age, with new damage and other signs of wear being found in various modules. Most recently, Russian cosmonauts spotted about half a dozen new cracks in their Zarya module<\/a>. And while both NASA and Roscosmos say the cracks don\u2019t pose a threat to crewmembers, Insider<\/a> <\/em>reports<\/a> that Shepherd spoke to a House of Representatives committee on Tuesday, telling the lawmakers that they need to pay attention to the possible hazard, which he called a \u201cserious problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA is currently trying to secure another four years\u2019 worth of funding for the ISS, which would allow it to keep the orbital outpost running until 2,028 according to Insider<\/em>. But Shepherd says NASA would be unwise to do so before actually investigating these cracks to determine not only how bad they are today but whether they\u2019ll continue to get worse, as Russian officials have warned<\/a> they might.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting to the bottom of this is a fairly serious issue,\u201d Shepherd told Congress. \u201cI don\u2019t think the station\u2019s in any immediate danger. But before we clear the station for another so many years of operational use, we should better understand this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The space station has been showing its age, with new damage and other signs of wear being found in various modules. Most recently, Russian cosmonauts spotted about half a dozen new cracks in their Zarya module. And while both NASA and Roscosmos say the cracks don\u2019t pose a threat to crewmembers, Insider reports that Shepherd [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1490,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}