Month: September 2024

Enlarge / A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing's Starliner capsule docked at the lab's forward port (lower right). (credit: Satellite image (c) 2024 Maxar Technologies)

US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old.

However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part of the station, essentially a tunnel that connects a larger module to a docking port, which is leaking.

Russian and US officials have known that this small PrK module, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module, has been leaking since September 2019. A new report, published Thursday by NASA's inspector general, provides details not previously released by the space agency that underline the severity of the problem.

Enlarge / Dr. John Timmer, Jeff Ball, Joanna Wong, and Lee Hutchinson discussing infrastructure and the environment. (credit: Kimberly White/Getty Images)

Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose to kick off an event titled "Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next," hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a room packed full of interested Ars readers, and for everyone who was able to come, thank you for being there! (For everyone who wasn't able to come, that's okay—we're doing another event next month in DC. I'll have more info about that at the end of this piece.)

The San Jose event was hosted at the Computer History Museum, which, as venues go, was absolutely on-brand and appropriate—and Ars would like to extend its thanks to the folks at CHM for being so kind and accommodating to our gathering of geeks.

"Our lineup of speakers and topics today reflects the complexity and rapid evolution of the tech landscape we all operate in," noted Fisher in his opening remarks on the program. "We will be discussing not only the promise of generative AI, but also the challenges it brings in terms of infrastructure demands, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts."