The International Space Station is out of control due to a fire in a Russian module-NASA Reuters

Authors: Steve Gorman and Polina Ivanova

(Reuters)-NASA officials said that the International Space Station (ISS) briefly lost control on Thursday when the jet thruster of the newly arrived Russian research module was accidentally launched a few hours after docking with the orbital outpost.

According to NASA and the Russian state-owned news agency RIA, the seven crew members on board — two Russian astronauts, three NASA astronauts, one Japanese astronaut and one European Space Agency astronaut from France — Never faced any direct danger.

However, the failure prompted NASA to postpone its plan to launch Boeing’s (NYSE:) new CST-100 Starliner capsule at least until August 3 for an unmanned test flight to the space station. The Starliner was originally scheduled to be launched on an Atlas (NYSE:) V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.

Thursday’s accident occurred approximately three hours after the multifunctional Nauka module locked the space station. NASA officials said that the module’s jet plane restarted inexplicably, causing the entire space station to deviate from its normal flight position about 250 miles above the Earth.

According to NASA space station manager Joel Montalbano, the “loss of attitude control” lasted more than 45 minutes, until the ground flight team managed to restore the direction of the space station by activating the thrusters on another module of the orbital platform. program.

In a broadcast report on the incident, RIA quoted NASA experts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, describing the struggle to regain control of the space station as a “tug-of-war” between the two modules.

A few hours later, Montalbano said in a conference call between NASA and reporters that at the height of the incident, the space station deviated from orbit at a rate of about half a degree per second.

NASA said that the Nauka engine was eventually shut down, the space station stabilized, and its direction returned to the starting position.

Montalbano said that during the interruption, contact with the crew was briefly interrupted twice, but “the crew was not in immediate danger at any time.”

He said that the automatic sensors on the ground first detected the drift in the normal direction of the space station, “the crew really didn’t feel any movement.”

NASA officials said that the cause of the failure of the thruster on the Nauka module delivered by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos has not been determined.

Montalbano said that there is currently no sign of any damage to the space station. The flight correction maneuvers consumed more propellant reserves than expected, “but I won’t worry about it,” he said.

After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last week, the module experienced a series of malfunctions, raising concerns about whether the docking procedure would proceed smoothly.

According to TASS news agency, Roscosmos attributed the problem after Thursday’s docking to Nauka’s engine having to work with residual fuel in the spacecraft.

“The process of transferring the Nauka module from the flight mode to the’Docking with the International Space Station’ mode is ongoing. Work is being done on the remaining fuel in the module,” TASS quoted Roscosmos as saying.

The Nauka module is intended to be used as a research laboratory, storage unit and airlock, and will upgrade Russia’s capabilities on the International Space Station.

The live broadcast showed that the module named after the Russian word “science” was docked with the space station several minutes later than the scheduled time.

“According to telemetry data and reports from the staff of the International Space Station, the space station’s airborne systems and Nauka modules are operating normally,” Roscosmos said in a statement.

“There is a connection!!!” Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, wrote on Twitter shortly after the match.

(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Polina Ivanova in Moscow, editing by Mark Heinrich and Leslie Adler)