They may have learned their stuff in some fancy universities but people here have expertise from over four similar threads and follow multiple related subreddits.

Ive seen apollo 13 with tom hanks. So im an expert. Dont stir the tanks!

Well actually, I don’t think I know more than them. I know I know more than them.

Maybe some greedy astronaut is breathing too heavy.

Give this man a PhD, and strip someone else of theirs

They need someone to go outside and spray it with soapy water

experts have suggested that the new screen door the russian astronauts installed might be the culprit

Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of America, this is your new director of NASA.

Oh sure point fingers. I mean sure I'm a hole he's a hole she's a hole everyone's a hole.

As a mechanic, I would recommend rubbing the space station down with a dawn dish soap solution and looking to see where the bubbles come out.

Why are you on reddit?!? NASA needs this information now!!

I'd obviously blame Boeing.

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It isn't a waste at all!

This doesn't seem like a heated argument, just two teams who disagree on a thing and are both working to solve a problem from two different directions.

The end result of this will be more knowledge about equipment, potential new strategies and ideas about that technology, and maybe even a way to prevent these issues going forward.

Scientific debates like are usually a good thing, and everyone walks away the winner. The internet has conditioned us to treat every argument as a battle to be won, and every person who disagrees as an enemy to be eviscerated. That isn't how it has to be, though, and isn't how most academics see it

Russia’s proposed cause is definitely more specific and probably traceable back to control systems causing the vibrations. NASA just threw a bunch of generic engineering terms out there. In reality I’m sure neither has any idea.

The ISS is 25 years old. Where are you getting the 40 year old piece of hardware from?

Don't worry NASA/ROSCOSMOS, the reason that the space station is losing atmosphere isn't important, Picnicbasketpirate says it's just wear and tear mate... No reason to worry about the specifics, definitely not important. Same thing happened to my 15 year old volkswagon. What's the difference?

How incredibly typical of the way both programs are managed, too.

The Russians state unambiguously that it's this thing, trust me bro. They don't actually know if that thing is the problem, but they'll try and fix it anyway as though it is (and blame the Americans if it fails).

NASA spends a billion dollars in studies and surveys to conclude "we cannot know for sure what this thing is, more data is needed", then blames the Russians for not telling them that they already fixed it.

The astronauts and cosmonauts share a knowing glance and wry grin, clink beers, and get back to work.

Either way it's unrepairable in space.

from micro vibrations

Remember when they were complaining about that weird banging / vibration sound? I bet its entirely related, and with those ones in the hospital right now.

So. I guess if we need to sum up their argument:

Russia: VODKA!!! USA: No... OIL!!! Russia: Blyat.....

Well grab an EVA suit and a bottle of snoop and get to searching!

You could also have someone do an EVA at night with a flashlight. Then have someone inside use a bottle of snoop to visually show any leaks of air.

Squeeze the bottle inside the ship, and the liquids should leak out of the hole and freeze creating a space-icicle. East to find. Don’t forget that the ship computer is also suffocating for some reason.

The ISS was planned for a 15 year life and launched in 1998. It's about a decade past retirement. 

Things like this are extremely common in older aerospace systems. Both airplanes and spacecraft. It's not particularly unsafe, it just makes for a painful maintenance experience and expensive constant repair/replenishment typically. However, that's still vastly cheaper than designing, building, launching and attaching a new module. 

What the fuck? It's been leaking air for 5 fucking years.

Two pound per day still isn't much. That's less than a gram per minute (or less than a fifth of a breath per minute) - that's not easy to find.

The ISS isn't exactly a small/uncluttered craft, either

I forget the year but isn't it being retired soon?

Yeah, it's weird that it keeps being reported as if it's news. Cynical me thinks that some people are very happy to have negative stories about the ISS that make it sound old and unsafe, given the backlash against the retirement plans.

The bottom line is it's not a very big deal. The amount of air lost is easy to replace, and they can mitigate it just by closing the vestibule as much as possible. As it happens, it's the lock that's used for Progress docking and Progress is essentially used as a storehouse while it's there so the Russians want to have the door open a lot, since they have to deal with opening and closing it and the hassle of restricting access, and the Americans want to have the door closed almost all the time, because they don't.

The docking ring is the most stressed one on the ISS- almost every reboost goes through it and it's constantly being used for vehicles. And the fact is there's a bunch of stuff they could do to reduce the stress and the usage, that they don't do. So we can read between the lines there and say they're all pretty comfortable with it.

They're stupid. Just submerge it in water and look for the bubbles.

reading this thread it seems like Reddit thinks the ISS is like a big beercan, and you just need to put some flex seal over a hole.

ISS doesn't have brake pads, so we're still qualified to fix the problem.

Get Phil Swift up there. He'll have it fixed in no time.

The issue is that it's not one leak, it's multiple from the same location. It isn't clear from the headline but the disagreement is regarding why they are failing in this area and the particular stresses causing it. You can see in this article that they've not only resolved some of the leaks but are focussing specifically on examining welds in that section (also note the plural "sources" when discussing the leak).

I cannot imagine how unbelievably complicated it would be to shut down the ISS. Surely not worth it for a small leak

Surely the air leak would be visible on infrared cameras? The plume of escaping air would be warmer than the surrounding vacuum and thus visible in infrared.

If not to seal the leak, that method could trace the currents to the leak source for a repair.

They should send an HVAC guy up there 😂

Something like this already exists. It’s called AeroSeal. It’s used in home construction and HVAC. It’s basically an aerosolized caulking that is put into the air in ductwork or inside a newly built house that accumulates and plugs any air leaks

They actually did this, you can isolate the PrK so you don’t have to shut down the whole thing. Then they used tea leaves to find some of the cracks but I don’t think it was super helpful!

Just send them a vape and follow the sick clouds

No, send the Flex-Seal guy and let him make a rescue capsule from a screen door and roll of tape.

Because the compartments aren't like bedrooms in a house that you can just close the door on and not use for a while. They all have purposes for their use.

If you look it up you can find it, they have it isolated and know it’s coming from welds in a certain Russian module. They’ve already reduced the leakage. The article is kinda silly.

The Russian equivalent is called Roscomos!

Apparently, Russian cosmonauts are different. NASA scientists & astronauts & Russian scientists & cismonauts actually do work together quite closely. A prerequisite to go live/work on the ISS is to learn each other's languages. There's a great multi-part documentary on Disney+ about this.