Remember that small leak on the International Space Station discovered in 2018 that was traced to a Russian module and apparently made by a drill bit? (Implicating the technicans that built the module on earth, Ars Technica wrote “There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected…”)
It’s being revisited in the aftermath of a more recent incident involving Russia’s Nauka science module to the International Space Station. (A software glitch after launch had required two course corrections for its rocket, and then while docking in space the module mistakenly fired its thrusters, causing the space station to briefly loss control, as well as communication with earth for 11 minutes.) Russia “is furious at what it says is unfair criticism of its space program,” notes Futurism.com.
In response, Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS has presented an anonymous interview with someone said to be a “high ranking” official at their space agency suggesting that the 2018 drill hole could’ve been caused by an emotionally unstable NASA flight engineer onboard the space station. The state-owned agency’s story claims this flight engineer had discovered a blood clot in their jugular vein, and could’ve decided their return to earth for medical treatment might be expedited by sabotaging Russia’s module. The problem with this story? Space.com reports:
NASA officials knew the precise locations of the U.S. astronauts before the leak occurred and at the moment it began, thanks to space station surveillance. The video footage indicated that none of the U.S. astronauts on the station were near the Russian segment where the Soyuz vehicle was docked.
So Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS now suggests that NASA could’ve tampered with that video to cover-up sabotage by NASA’s astronauts — and points out that they weren’t allowed to administer lie-detecting polygraph tests to those astronauts.
Asked to comment on the “unstable astronaut” theory, NASA’s human spaceflight chief said they “did not find this accusation credible.”
Ars Technica calls Russia’s claims “extraordinarily defamatory.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.