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 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.
But the malfunction prompted Nasa to postpone until at least August 3 its planned launch of Boeing's new CST-100 Starliner capsule on a highly anticipated uncrewed test flight to the space station.
The Starliner had been set to blast off atop an Atlas V rocket on Friday from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
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.