Houston – An oxygen generator on the international space station overheated and spilled a toxic irritant early Monday, forcing the three-man crew to don masks and gloves in the first emergency ever declared aboard the 8-year- old orbiting outpost.
NASA said the crew members’ lives were never in any danger. They cleaned up the spill with towels. A charcoal filter scrubbed the irritant out of the air. And within a couple of hours, life aboard the station 220 miles above Earth was nearly back to normal.
But it was the biggest scare this smooth-running space station has had.
Although it paled in comparison with two fires and a collision on two previous Russian space stations and the nearly fatal explosion on Apollo 13, the incident served as a reminder of how life-and-death emergencies can come out of nowhere. It is why an emergency space capsule is always parked at the outpost in case of a sudden order to abandon ship.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration never came close to ordering the crew to leave, program manager Mike Suffredini said. But astronauts indicated they were worried.
About three hours after the emergency, station commander Pavel Vinogradov tried to explain what happened to Moscow Mission Control, saying “different thoughts came to my mind.”
Russian flight controllers interrupted, telling him: “We were kind of nervous here too.”
NASA and the Russian space agency were investigating what caused the problem.
The astronauts sounded an alarm after the equipment began smoking and turned off the ventilation system to avoid spreading any fumes from leaking drops of potassium hydroxide, which is used to power batteries.
Monitors showed that the cabin air was safe.
Potassium hydroxide, a corrosive also known as potash lye, can cause serious burns, but it has no odor, so the smell was probably caused by a burning gasket, Mission Control informed the crew. “It was just an irritant issue,” NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said.
It was the type of problem that is always in the back of crew members’ minds, said former astronaut Jerry Linenger, who was aboard the Russian space station Mir during a 1997 fire and dealt with frequent antifreeze leaks that gave it a gas-stationlike smell.
“Fumes is one of those low-level risks that sort of wears on you,” Linenger said. “You realize you are in a closed ecosystem, and you’re breathing it. It’s kind of in the back of your mind, and it’s hard to get out of the back of your mind. … You’re thinking, ‘This is not good.”‘
The problems in the international space station’s main service module started after Vinogradov restarted the often-troubled Russian Elektron oxygen generator on Moscow’s orders.
