On Thursday a few hours after docking, jet thrusters of a newly arrived Russian research module inadvertently fired, throwing the International Space Station briefly out of control
The International Space Station (ISS) was thrown briefly out of control on Thursday when jet thrusters of a newly arrived Russian research module inadvertently fired a few hours after it was docked to the orbiting outpost, NASA officials said.
According to NASA and Russian state-owned news agency RIA, seven crew members were aboard – two Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European space agency astronaut from France – were never in any immediate danger
But the malfunction prompted NASA to postpone a highly anticipated uncrewed test flight to the space station which had been set to blast off on Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On Thursday the multipurpose Nauka module had latched onto the space station, about three hours later, as mission controllers in Moscow were performing some post-docking “reconfiguration” procedures, the module inadvertently fired, according to NASA.
Following the docking of the Nauka module, the module's thrusters started firing at 12:45 pm ET, moving the station out of orientation. Ground teams have regained attitude control and the motion of the space station is stable. https://t.co/8tuzbgICs1
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) July 29, 2021
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The module’s jets inexplicably restarted, causing the entire station to pitch out of its normal flight position some 250 miles above the Earth, leading the mission’s flight director to declare a “spacecraft emergency,” U.S. space agency officials said.
According to Joel Montalbano, manager of NASA’s space station program, an unexpected drift in the station’s orientation was first detected by automated ground sensors, followed 15 minutes later by a “loss of attitude control” that lasted a little over 45 minutes.
NASA officials said, flight teams on the ground managed to restore the space station’s orientation by activating thrusters on another module of the orbiting platform.
RIA cited NASA specialists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as describing the struggle to regain control of the space station as a “tug of war” between the two modules.
If the situation would become so dangerous as to require evacuation of personnel, the crew could have escaped in a SpaceX crew capsule still parked at the outpost and designed to serve as a “lifeboat” if necessary, said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program.
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