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Space station's leaky hose called poorly designed

Posted on: Saturday, 24 January 2004, 06:00 CST

Space station's leaky hose called poorly designed

Associated Press

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Cape Canaveral, Fla. -- The hose responsible for the slow air leak aboard the International Space Station was poorly designed and cracked in part because crew members kept grabbing it to look out a window, a NASA official said Friday.

The hose was removed and capped off earlier this month, and the air pressure aboard the orbiting outpost has since stabilized.

"It's not a very good design," said Bill Gerstenmaier, space station program manager. "These hoses are known to crack."

The hose is used to prevent a window on the space station from fogging up. It removes condensation that forms between the panes of glass and vents it into space.

Crew members, over time, contributed to the cracking of the flexible metal hose by grabbing it to look out the window, Gerstenmaier said.

"There are not a lot of places on the window to hold onto from the crew's standpoint," he said. "I think the crew using it wouldn't necessarily have been a problem if we had done a little better job on the design side."

A spare hose will be sent up on a Russian cargo ship that is scheduled to be launched next week.

Astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri discovered the hose was leaking Jan. 11. It caused a slow drop in pressure for three weeks -- the biggest prolonged loss of pressure ever on the space station.

NASA workers are reviewing other hoses on the station to see whether they have a similar design.

The newly formed NASA Engineering and Safety Center in Hampton, Va., also will look at whether there are other means of detecting leaks on the station. The center was formed as part of the reforms undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the space shuttle Columbia disaster almost a year ago that killed seven astronauts.

Foale and Kaleri are tentatively set to take a spacewalk in late February, which will leave the station temporarily unmanned. They will look for the source of a noise they heard in November that sounded like a flapping sheet of metal.

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