Mishap on Russian module rocks International Space Station

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<strong>The International Space Station (ISS) was destabilised on Thursday after engines of a newly-arrived Russian module inadvertently fired up a few hours after it was docked to the orbiting outpost, NASA officials said.</strong></p>
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The seven crew members on board, comprising 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.</p>
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Nasa tweeted that "the module's thrusters started firing at 12:45pm ET (16:45 GMT) inadvertently and unexpectedly, moving the station 45 degrees out of attitude".</p>
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The mishap forced Nasa and Boeing to push back an uncrewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the ISS from 30 July to at least 3 August.</p>
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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.</p>
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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.</p>
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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.</p>
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The Nauka engines were ultimately switched off, the space station was stabilized and its orientation was restored to where it had begun, NASA said.</p>
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The 13m-long, 20-tonne Nauka is attached to the rear of the orbiting platform, linking up with the other major Russian segments on the station.</p>
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Nauka, named after the Russian word for science, will result in a significant increase in habitable volume for the ISS, raising it by 70 cubic metres.</p>
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Cosmonauts will use the extra space to conduct experiments and to store cargo. They'll also use it as a rest area, and it has another toilet for crew to use on the station.</p>
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According to BBC News, Nauka's installation comes just as Russia has been questioning its future role in the ISS project. Moscow officials recently warned about the more-than-20-year age of some of their on-orbit hardware and intimated the country could pull out of the station in 2025. And Russia has shown little interest in joining the US-led lunar platform, known as the Gateway, which will be assembled later this decade.</p>