SpaceX CEO and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has highlighted issues with the International Space Station (ISS), calling for it to be decommissioned, amid a recent NASA announcement stating that the Axiom Mission 4 was indefinitely postponed.
A new pressure signature has emerged from the Zvezda service module, located at the rear-end of the ISS. This module provides living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing systems, flight control systems and propulsion systems for the ISS, according to NASA.
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The ISS's structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed. We are having multiple, and increasingly frequent, leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section.
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) June 12, 2025
When Aluminum gets flexed it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its… https://t.co/J73qY0FzzY
The pressure signature, which comes despite a recent inspection of the module’s interior surfaces, sealing additional areas of interest, and measuring the current leak rate, is a significant cause for concern, because it could depressurise “in less than a minute”, according to physicist and Terraform Industries founder Dr Casey Handmer.
He explained that another possibility was “a leak slow enough to close some hatches” and get the crew to safety, but the outcome depended on luck.
Adding that the ISS' structural integrity was not even “single fault tolerant”—meaning that there were no reserve mechanisms to counter sudden structural issues, and that any fault could badly compromise it—he expressed alarm at the multiple cracks discovered in the Russian section of the space station.
Musk echoes his sense of alarm, explaining that the ISS presented serious safety concerns, and that it ought to be de-orbited within two years.
There are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the @Space_Station. Some parts of it are simply getting too old and obviously that risk grows over time.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 13, 2025
Even though @SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts & cargo to the ISS, I… https://t.co/TcyUwcwHfE
The highly anticipated spaceflight's crew involved leader Peggy Whitson, director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space, pilot Shubhanshu Shukla from ISRO, and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Tibor Kapu from the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Axiom's 4-member crew will lift off aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on Falcon 9 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida: the very same spacecraft whose operations Musk had threatened to stop, during his recent online war with US President Donald Trump. A new launch date is yet to be revealed.
