ISS Hole Was Made Deliberately And Not A Result Of Accident, Claims Russia Space Agency Head

Russian investigators who probed into the origin of a hole that caused an oxygen leak at the International Space Station think that the hole was made deliberately, the head of the Russian space agency said.

Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin revealed on television late Monday that a first commission has already delivered its report on the ISS leak.

Rogozin said that the hole was not a defect or the result of some accident, as earlier proposed, but rather damage that was intentionally made.

“It concluded that a manufacturing defect had been ruled out which is important to establish the truth,” Rogozin said, according to Phys.org. “Where it was made will be established by a second commission, which is at work now.”

In late August, ground-based ISS controllers detected a slight pressure drop aboard the space station. The breach was traced to a small air leak in the Soyuz aircraft.

The Soyuz spacecraft ferries astronauts to and from the space station. The hole was found in a section that will not be used for the return journey to Earth.

Crews onboard the orbiting laboratory managed to find a temporary fix for the leak with Soyuz commander Sergey Prokopyev using thermo-resistant tape to plug the hole.

Rogozin initially said that the leak may have been caused by a micrometeorite but this was ruled out after NASA released an image of the damaged panel that showed a set of scratchy drill marks around the hole.

The U.S. space agency deleted the picture but Russia has since considered the possibility that somebody indeed drilled a hole.

Rogozin suggested that the hole may have been deliberately drilled either back on Earth or in space. Russian politician and former cosmonaut Maxim Suraev also said that the actions of a mentally unstable crew member could not be ruled out.

In televised comments, Rogozin said that there were several attempts at drilling, which he said appeared to have been done by someone with a “wavering hand.” He then said that a state commission would seek to find out who the culprit is.

“What is this: a production defect or some premeditated actions?” Rogozin asked, as quoted by The Guardian. “We are checking the Earth version. But there is another version that we do not rule out: deliberate interference in space.”

The report of the first commission tasked to investigate the leak backs up suspicions of a sabotage.