When your toilet breaks at home, at least you can call a plumber. On the International Space Station, sitting about 250 miles above the surface of the Earth, the solution is a bit more complicated. Last week, while trying to upgrade their toilet facility, the ISS crew accidentally caused a water leak on the station.
The toilet onboard the ISS was installed in 2008, during one of the last Space Shuttle missions. It’s based on a design that’s about as old as the ISS itself, so it was in need of some improvement. The ISS astronauts were trying to install that improvement when something went wrong. 



             The ISS crew were trying to install the new Universal Waste Management System, a next-gen toilet system that’s supposed to be smaller, lighter, cleaner, and more efficient than what they have now. The UWMS will be installed on NASA’s upcoming Orion spacecraft and the proposed lunar space station NASA is expected to construct over the next decade.

Before any of that happens, though, the toilet is getting extensively tested on the ISS. Last week, a group of astronauts tried to set it up, and while eventually they managed to get it working, there were some complications. Specifically, one of the water pipes leaked, sending about 2.5 gallons of water drifting throughout the station. Astronauts managed to collect all the water and fix the leak without much difficulty.

One of the dangers of floating in a space station is that you really have to worry about leaks. After all, there’s only a thin metal shell standing between you and the vacuum of space, and even a small hole can quickly prove disastrous.

That’s the reality the astronauts aboard the International Space Station awoke to yesterday, when it was discovered that a small leak in the station was causing the air pressure inside to drop. Fortunately, the hole was small enough that it wasn’t life-threatening, and one of the astronauts simply plugged the hole with his finger while waiting for a more permanent fix.

Initially, ground crews monitoring the ISS noticed the leak because of a small drop in air pressure aboard the station while the astronauts were sleeping. With a larger leak, the astronauts would have been woken up right away, but this particular leak was small enough that NASA decided it could wait until morning.

Once the astronauts woke up, they immediately spent the first few hours hunting down the leak. They finally located it aboard the orbital section of Soyuz spacecraft MS-09, although it’s not exactly clear what could have caused it. The leak itself is a small hole two millimeters wide, and NASA suspects it was caused by a small micrometeorite punching a hole in the wall.


Looking at a photo of the hole, it looks less like a puncture caused by a small meteorite and more like a hole that was purposefully drilled. That's not just a layman's observation either. Dmitry Rogozin, the Director General of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, suspects that the drilling was done with the intention of causing a leak. “There were several attempts at drilling,” he said in televised comments, by a “wavering hand.”

“What is this?” he asked. “A production defect or some premeditated actions?”
This issue is particularly important for Russia, because the leak was located on a Russian-made Soyuz spacecraft. If that hole was drilled during the manufacturing process, that means Russian manufacturers could be to blame. It’s “matter of honor” for Russia and Soyuz manufacturer Energiya, says Rogozin.

If the cause is a production defect, then it will likely show up on tests of other Soyuz spacecraft here on Earth. Those tests are currently underway, but it’s also possible an employee or contractor drilled that hole either accidentally or deliberately. In this case, the person could have sealed the hole somehow, where it remained hidden for weeks until the vacuum of space caused the sealant to dry up and break apart.


Still another possibility is that the Soyuz was fine when it launched, and the hole was drilled by someone living inside the station. Russian cosmonaut-turned MP Maxim Surayev suspects that this could be the case, the result of an astronaut who couldn’t deal with space life anymore. “We're all human, and anyone might want to go home, but this method is really low,” he said. “If a cosmonaut pulled this strange stunt—and that can't ruled out— it's really bad.”

Regardless of how this hole appeared, it seems more than possible that a human somewhere is responsible. Whether that human currently lives on Earth or in space, and whether that human knew what they were doing, is still unclear.

ALSO READ: ECLIPSE  OF 2019.