![]() ![]() The flight correction maneuvers used up more propellant reserves than desired, "but nothing I would worry about," he said. Montalbano said there was no immediate sign of any damage to the space station. What caused the malfunction of the thrusters on the Nauka module, delivered by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has yet to be determined, NASA officials said. He said "the crew really didn't feel any movement." Had the situation 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. Communication with the crew was lost for several minutes twice during the disruption, but "there was no immediate danger at any time to the crew," Montalbano said. The Nauka engines were ultimately switched off, the space station was stabilized and its orientation was restored to where it had begun, NASA said. At the height of the incident, the station was pitching out of alignment at the rate of about a half a degree per second, Montalbano said during a NASA conference call with reporters. In its broadcast coverage of the incident, 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. 'TUG-OF-WAR' Flight teams on the ground managed to restore the space station's orientation by activating thrusters on another module of the orbiting platform, NASA officials said. ![]() Thursday's mishap began about three hours after the multipurpose Nauka module had latched onto the space station, as mission controllers in Moscow were performing some post-docking "reconfiguration" procedures, according to NASA. The Starliner had been set to blast off atop an Atlas V rocket on Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 3 its planned launch of Boeing's new CST-100 Starliner capsule on a highly anticipated uncrewed test flight to the space station. But the malfunction prompted NASA to postpone until at least Aug. The seven crew members aboard - two Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European space agency astronaut from France - were never in any immediate danger, according to NASA and Russian state-owned news agency RIA. Meanwhile, a Russian trio gets ready for a Saturday night departure.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. The Exp 65 crew worked science and upkeep as the station regained attitude control Friday morning. Then, in a Soyuz descent module, they'll soar through the sky for a little more than three hours before making a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. They will undock from the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module on Saturday at 9:14 p.m. Commander Oleg Novitskiy and spaceflight participants Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko will return to Earth on Sunday. This means that the departure of the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft remains on track. However, compared to the July 29th event, the ISS suffered a slight attitude change this time. The module suddenly fired its thrusters, sending the ISS into an out-of-control spin. On July 29th, the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module Nauka, which serves as a science facility, docking port, and spacewalk airlock for space operations, encountered a software failure. This is not the first incident of such nature. "NASA and Roscosmos are collaborating to understand the root cause," reads a statement from NASA. Flight controllers are assessing the situation. Currently, the orbiting lab is in stable condition, and the crew is safe. It took half an hour for the flight controllers to regain attitude control of the space station. This pushed the ISS slightly out of position at 5:13 a.m. On Monday morning, the thruster firing continued after the end of the test window. To ensure that everything worked accordingly before their departure, Russian flight controllers conducted a scheduled thruster firing test on the spacecraft. The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft is expected to carry three space travelers living aboard the orbiting lab, including a Russian actress and her producer-director, back to Earth on Sunday, October 17th. ![]()
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