International Space Station thrown out of control by misfire of Russian module, says Nasa

The International Space Station (ISS) was thrown briefly uncontrolled on Thursday when jet thrusters of a newly arrived Russian analysis module inadvertently fired a couple of hours after it was docked to the orbiting outpost, NASA officers stated.

The seven crew members aboard – two Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European area company astronaut from France – had been by no means in any rapid hazard, in response to NASA and Russian state-owned information company RIA.

However the malfunction prompted NASA to postpone till not less than Aug. 3 its deliberate launch of Boeing’s new CST-100 Starliner capsule on a extremely anticipated uncrewed check flight to the area station. The Starliner had been set to blast off atop an Atlas V rocket on Friday from the Kennedy Area Middle in Florida.

Thursday’s mishap started about three hours after the multipurpose Nauka module had latched onto the area station, as mission controllers in Moscow had been performing some post-docking “reconfiguration” procedures, in response to NASA.

The module’s jets inexplicably restarted, inflicting the whole station to pitch out of its regular flight place some 250 miles above the Earth, main the mission’s flight director to declare a “spacecraft emergency,” U.S. area company officers stated.