Spacewalkers Unable To Locate Spektr Lab Leak Russians Already Developing ‘Nontraditional’ Ways To Find It

Expect no easy fix for the dead Spektr lab on Russia’s space station Mir.

For Spektr to be repaired and usable again, spacewalkers needed to find a leak caused by a June 25 crash. For six hours Saturday morning two spacewalkers groped, probed and just plain looked for that crack or hole.

They just couldn’t find it.

“Not pinpointing it makes it impossible to repair,” NASA shuttle-Mir Director Frank Culbertson said Saturday.

Asif Siddiqi, a historian on the Russian space program who is writing books for NASA, said, “There’s probably little hope of ever bringing Spektr back up to what it used to be.”

But Russia won’t give up trying. Engineers already are working on what Russian flight director Vladimir Solovyov called “nontraditional” ways of finding the leak on Spektr, which housed half of the U.S. science experiments.

That may include releasing marker gases in Spektr to watch where the stuff leaks out or using infrared sensors to find a hull breach, Culbertson said in a news conference. Siddiqi said he expects there to be several more efforts to find the leak.

But it couldn’t be spotted with the naked eye.

Mir Commander Anatoly Solovyev and U.S. astronaut Michael Foale looked in seven places. They saw dents, bumps and broken struts, but they did not find the proverbial smoking gun pointing to a hole or crack.

The spacewalkers found a possible culprit: the base of one of the solar panels that the garbage-toting robot ship hit in June.

The base was bumped off and away from the ship’s hull, leaving a gap of about 1.5 inches, spacewalkers said.

“The assumption is that there was depressurization somewhere in the location of that gap,” Flight Director Solovyov said.

A tub-shaped area of the hull, obscured from view, could be punctured or split there, officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

If so, a repair “bandage” type of cap for the base - once the solar panel is jettisoned - will be brought to Mir by the space shuttle Atlantis later this month.

It will be the most difficult fix possible, Solovyov said.

Despite not finding a leak, NASA and Russian officials called the spacewalk a success. Solovyev and Foale repositioned two solar power panels to help increase Mir’s weakened power supply as much as 35 percent, officials said.

“If you can’t fix Spektr, it’s not the end of the world,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “It’s more important to reposition the panels to get power to the rest of the facility.”

Even without Spektr, Mir has several other labs, said Jeffrey Manber, director of Energia Limited, the U.S. arm of the main Russian space company.

NASA had asked for Russia to have the spacewalkers do some exterior plumbing work so cosmonauts eventually can set up a backup carbon dioxide removal system. The spacewalkers didn’t have time to do it, but Culbertson said that’s no big deal.

Jim Oberg, a Houston engineer who has written about the Russian space program, said it doesn’t bode well because the main carbon dioxide removal system is rickety.

Still, Culbertson said having Foale spacewalk was important: “This was a case where we were not just watching a major event occur on the Mir, but we were participating.”