International Space Station | Pakistan

A worsening air leak aboard the International Space Station (ISS) prompted five astronauts to take shelter and prepare for evacuation for roughly two hours on Friday as Russia attempted to fix a crack on its portion of the orbital laboratory, Nasa said. The four astronauts of Nasa’s Crew-12 mission aboard the station two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut along with another US astronaut were ordered by Nasa mission control at 9:04am ET (1304 GMT) on Friday to enter their SpaceX-built Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, Nasa spokesperson Bethany Stevens said. Nasa reversed that order roughly two hours later and told the astronauts they could return to the station as the agency and its Russian counterparts examined the rate of leaking air. Nasa and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, the station’s two primary operators, have debated for months over the cause and potential fixes of small air leaks aboard Russia’s Zvezda service module, a key structure of the ISS, a football field-size o...

An international team of four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked on Saturday with the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). “Docking confirmed!”, SpaceX posted on social media, along with a video showing the spacecraft making contact with the ISS at 2:27am Eastern Time (11:27am PKT), far above the southeast Pacific Ocean. American astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov are joining the ISS on a six-month mission. They lifted off on Friday morning from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, their capsule mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket. It is the 11th crew rotation mission to the ISS under Nasa’s Commercial Crew Programme, created to succeed the Space Shuttle era by partnering with private industry. “We have cold drinks, hot food, and us waiting — see you soon,” the ISS crew told the new arrivals shortly after contact, according to the posted video. “Hello Space Station — Crew 11 is here and we are super excited to join,” Fincke replied...