Space station situation with Russian module misfire more serious than stated: report
The space station spun far more than the reported 45 degrees, according to NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville.
By Chelsea Gohd
The space station spun far more than the reported 45 degrees, according to NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville.
By Chelsea Gohd
According to NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville, the docking mishap last week with Russia's Nauka module was worse than reported. In this image you can see Russia's Nauka module docked with the International Space Station on July 29, 2021. (Image credit: Thomas Pesquet/ESA/NASA)
Last week, a Russian module accidentally pushed the International Space Station out of place. Now, a NASA flight director has revealed that the event was more serious than NASA initially reported.
On Thursday (July 29) morning, Russia's long-awaited research module Nauka docked with the space station. But a few hours later, the module accidentally fired its thrusters, briefly tilting the space station and causing it to lose what engineers call "attitude control."
However, while NASA said on Twitter and officials repeated during public comments about the incident that the orbiting lab tilted about 45 degrees, that appears not to have been the full story. According to reporting by The New York Times, Zebulon Scoville, the NASA flight director leading mission control in Houston during the event, says the station tilted far more severely than just 45 degrees.
Related: Russia's Nauka module tilts space station with unplanned thruster fire
According to Scoville, the event has "been a little incorrectly reported." He said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station "spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation," according to the report.
Scoville also shared that this was the first time that he has ever declared a "spacecraft emergency."
Today (Aug. 2), NASA representatives confirmed to Space.com that Scoville's representation of the incident is accurate. "Those numbers representing the change in attitude are correct," they said. "We'd reiterate that the maximum rate at which the change occurred was slow enough to go unnoticed by the crew members on board and all other station systems operated nominally during the entire event."
Another NASA representative added to Space.com that "the 45 degree number was initially offered in the first minutes after the event occurred by our guidance, navigation and control officer in Mission Control, but were later updated following an analysis of the actual divergence."
Unraveling the events
Following the event on Thursday, NASA held a news conference to discuss what had happened. During the news conference, space station program manager Joel Montalbano said, "There was no immediate danger at any time to the crew ... obviously, when you have a loss of attitude control, that's something you want to address right away. But the crew was never in any immediate emergency or anything like that."
Scoville has echoed this same sentiment, agreeing that the astronauts on board were never in danger in his comments to The New York Times. However, he revealed some details about the day's events that show that the mishap was a bit more serious than NASA's initial comments seemed to suggest.
According to the report, Scoville took over mission control after the docking. It was actually his day off, but he was on site because he'd helped to prepare for the module docking and wanted to see how it went. He ended up taking over from the previous lead, Gregory Whitney, who had a meeting to attend, after docking, thinking it would be smooth sailing from there. But soon, a caution warning lit up.
"We had two messages — just two lines of code — saying that something was wrong," Scoville said.
After initially thinking the message could perhaps be a mistake, he told The New York Times, he soon realized that it was not and that Nauka was not only firing its thrusters, but that it was trying to actually pull away from the space station that it had just docked with. And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia, which the space station wouldn't pass over for over an hour.
Related: International Space Station at 20: A photo tour
According to Scoville, the station reached a rotation rate maximum of 0.56 degrees per second. This wasn't fast enough for the astronauts to feel it, however, according to Scoville and also said by NASA officials during the briefing.
The crew, working together with ground teams, helped to counteract Nauka's thrusters by counter-firing thrusters on the Russian module Zvezda and Progress cargo ship. Additionally, 15 minutes after starting to fire, Nauka's thrusters stopped, though Scoville said he didn't know why the thrusters did so.
But this combined series of events and counteractive measures allowed the team to get the station to stop moving and return to its correct position.
"After doing that back flip one-and-a-half times around, it stopped and then went back the other way," Scoville told the New York Times.
"Probably the intensity goes up a little bit," Scoville said, as teams on the ground and also the seven astronauts on the station worked quickly to remedy the situation. "But," he added, "there's a pervasive kind of calmness of people not panicking and just looking at the data, figuring out what was happening and try to solve the problem from there."
After what was certainly not the relaxed day off he had planned, Scoville aired a sigh of relief on Twitter Thursday afternoon, after the station was back in position and the situation had stabilized.
"Yeehaw! That. Was. A. Day," he exclaimed.
Scoville also tweeted on Thursday that he had never before "been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached."
Despite the unexpected scare that the module mishap gave NASA last week, Scoville told the New York Times that he is assured in the partnership that Russia and the U.S. have on board the station.
"I have complete confidence in the Russians," he said. "They are a fantastic partnership with NASA and the entire International Space Station program."
Nauka's accidental thruster firing came one day ahead of the planned launch date for Boeing's uncrewed test flight for its Starliner astronaut taxi, which the company built with support from NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
To ensure that the situation with Nauka and the space station were stable before trying to dock another vehicle with the station, NASA and Boeing decided to postpone Starliner's launch to Tuesday (Aug. 3). at 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT).
Editor's Note: This story has been updated with new information and clarity provided by NASA to Space.com.
Chelsea Gohd joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2018 and returned as a Staff Writer in 2019. After receiving a B.S. in Public Health, she worked as a science communicator at the American Museum of Natural History and even wrote an installation for the museum's permanent Hall of Meteorites. Chelsea has written for publications including Scientific American, Discover Magazine Blog, Astronomy Magazine, Live Science, All That is Interesting, AMNH Microbe Mondays blog, The Daily Targum and Roaring Earth. When not writing, reading or following the latest space and science discoveries, Chelsea is writing music and performing as her alter ego Foxanne (@foxannemusic). You can follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd.
Last week, a Russian module accidentally pushed the International Space Station out of place. Now, a NASA flight director has revealed that the event was more serious than NASA initially reported.
On Thursday (July 29) morning, Russia's long-awaited research module Nauka docked with the space station. But a few hours later, the module accidentally fired its thrusters, briefly tilting the space station and causing it to lose what engineers call "attitude control."
However, while NASA said on Twitter and officials repeated during public comments about the incident that the orbiting lab tilted about 45 degrees, that appears not to have been the full story. According to reporting by The New York Times, Zebulon Scoville, the NASA flight director leading mission control in Houston during the event, says the station tilted far more severely than just 45 degrees.
Related: Russia's Nauka module tilts space station with unplanned thruster fire
According to Scoville, the event has "been a little incorrectly reported." He said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station "spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation," according to the report.
Scoville also shared that this was the first time that he has ever declared a "spacecraft emergency."
Today (Aug. 2), NASA representatives confirmed to Space.com that Scoville's representation of the incident is accurate. "Those numbers representing the change in attitude are correct," they said. "We'd reiterate that the maximum rate at which the change occurred was slow enough to go unnoticed by the crew members on board and all other station systems operated nominally during the entire event."
Another NASA representative added to Space.com that "the 45 degree number was initially offered in the first minutes after the event occurred by our guidance, navigation and control officer in Mission Control, but were later updated following an analysis of the actual divergence."
Unraveling the events
Following the event on Thursday, NASA held a news conference to discuss what had happened. During the news conference, space station program manager Joel Montalbano said, "There was no immediate danger at any time to the crew ... obviously, when you have a loss of attitude control, that's something you want to address right away. But the crew was never in any immediate emergency or anything like that."
Scoville has echoed this same sentiment, agreeing that the astronauts on board were never in danger in his comments to The New York Times. However, he revealed some details about the day's events that show that the mishap was a bit more serious than NASA's initial comments seemed to suggest.
According to the report, Scoville took over mission control after the docking. It was actually his day off, but he was on site because he'd helped to prepare for the module docking and wanted to see how it went. He ended up taking over from the previous lead, Gregory Whitney, who had a meeting to attend, after docking, thinking it would be smooth sailing from there. But soon, a caution warning lit up.
"We had two messages — just two lines of code — saying that something was wrong," Scoville said.
After initially thinking the message could perhaps be a mistake, he told The New York Times, he soon realized that it was not and that Nauka was not only firing its thrusters, but that it was trying to actually pull away from the space station that it had just docked with. And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia, which the space station wouldn't pass over for over an hour.
Related: International Space Station at 20: A photo tour
According to Scoville, the station reached a rotation rate maximum of 0.56 degrees per second. This wasn't fast enough for the astronauts to feel it, however, according to Scoville and also said by NASA officials during the briefing.
The crew, working together with ground teams, helped to counteract Nauka's thrusters by counter-firing thrusters on the Russian module Zvezda and Progress cargo ship. Additionally, 15 minutes after starting to fire, Nauka's thrusters stopped, though Scoville said he didn't know why the thrusters did so.
But this combined series of events and counteractive measures allowed the team to get the station to stop moving and return to its correct position.
"After doing that back flip one-and-a-half times around, it stopped and then went back the other way," Scoville told the New York Times.
"Probably the intensity goes up a little bit," Scoville said, as teams on the ground and also the seven astronauts on the station worked quickly to remedy the situation. "But," he added, "there's a pervasive kind of calmness of people not panicking and just looking at the data, figuring out what was happening and try to solve the problem from there."
After what was certainly not the relaxed day off he had planned, Scoville aired a sigh of relief on Twitter Thursday afternoon, after the station was back in position and the situation had stabilized.
"Yeehaw! That. Was. A. Day," he exclaimed.
Scoville also tweeted on Thursday that he had never before "been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached."
Despite the unexpected scare that the module mishap gave NASA last week, Scoville told the New York Times that he is assured in the partnership that Russia and the U.S. have on board the station.
"I have complete confidence in the Russians," he said. "They are a fantastic partnership with NASA and the entire International Space Station program."
Nauka's accidental thruster firing came one day ahead of the planned launch date for Boeing's uncrewed test flight for its Starliner astronaut taxi, which the company built with support from NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
To ensure that the situation with Nauka and the space station were stable before trying to dock another vehicle with the station, NASA and Boeing decided to postpone Starliner's launch to Tuesday (Aug. 3). at 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT).
Editor's Note: This story has been updated with new information and clarity provided by NASA to Space.com.
Chelsea Gohd joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2018 and returned as a Staff Writer in 2019. After receiving a B.S. in Public Health, she worked as a science communicator at the American Museum of Natural History and even wrote an installation for the museum's permanent Hall of Meteorites. Chelsea has written for publications including Scientific American, Discover Magazine Blog, Astronomy Magazine, Live Science, All That is Interesting, AMNH Microbe Mondays blog, The Daily Targum and Roaring Earth. When not writing, reading or following the latest space and science discoveries, Chelsea is writing music and performing as her alter ego Foxanne (@foxannemusic). You can follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd.
ISS
Nauka module’s near miss raises concerns about future of space station"Everything was going well, but there was a human factor."
ERIC BERGER - 8/2/2021,
Enlarge / Russia's Nauka module is seen attached to the International Space Station.
Roscosmos
Last Thursday the large new Russian space station module, Nauka, finally docked with the International Space Station after several technical issues en route to the orbiting laboratory. However, the problems did not end there. About three hours after linking to the station, Nauka began firing its propulsion thrusters, throwing the space station off kilter.
This led NASA Mission Control in Houston to initiate "loss of attitude control" procedures on board the station, a contingency astronauts and flight controllers train for. Then, in concert with flight controllers in Moscow, the teams commanded the station to fire its thrusters on the Russian segment of the space station, as well as a Progress supply vehicle attached to the laboratory. These combined actions prevented the station from tumbling too violently until Nauka exhausted its primary fuel supply.
FURTHER READING Russian module suddenly fires thrusters after docking with space station
Following this near miss, NASA hastily called a news conference and brought out key figures before the media, including human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders and the leader of the International Space Station program, Joel Montalbano. Both said NASA and the Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, had the situation well in hand and downplayed the overall risk to the station and the astronauts on board.
However, they deferred many questions on the technical issues to Roscosmos, which has offered mixed messages. A senior official in Roscosmos, former cosmonaut Vladimir Solovyov, said in an official statement, "Due to a short-term software failure, a direct command was mistakenly implemented to turn on the module's engines for withdrawal, which led to some modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole."
This makes the problem sound like a software error. But later, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, acknowledged that someone on the ground could have made a mistake. "Everything was going well, but there was a human factor," he told a Russian publication, as reported by Reuters. "There was some euphoria (after the successful docking), everybody got relaxed."
Now that the immediate danger has passed, the most pressing concerns are that this happened at all and what it may mean for ongoing Russian participation in the International Space Station program. For NASA, the primary goal is to maintain a human presence in low Earth orbit, and this means flying the station for the remainder of the 2020s.
A reliable partner?
Given the likelihood that Nauka's errant thruster firing involved human error, that would be at least the third major problem in less than three years resulting from shoddy work. In October 2018, the launch of Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague was aborted after a Soyuz booster failure, and the crew had to make an emergency return to Earth. A subsequent investigation found that the side-mounted booster had been improperly mated to the core stage of the Soyuz rocket.
FURTHER READING Russian space chief vows to find “full name” of technician who caused ISS leak
At around the same time, Russia announced that there was a small hole in a different Soyuz vehicle, already attached to the International Space Station. “We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician," Rogozin said of the problem.
These technical errors have occurred as Roscosmos has had difficulty paying its engineers and technicians a living wage. And now the country's space budget faces further pressure as NASA no longer needs to buy Soyuz seats for its astronauts to ride to the International Space Station—thanks to SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle and, hopefully soon, Boeing's Starliner.
Despite all of this, NASA has remained publicly supportive of Russia and its space program. And it has to be relieved that, regardless of its myriad troubles in getting to the space station, Nauka is now there and functional. This is important because it likely cements Russian participation in the space station for the remainder of this decade.
There is no guarantee of that. In recent months Russian officials have begun saying that Roscosmos' existing hardware on orbit, much of which is more than two decades old, is aging beyond repair. The Russians have also suggested they may pull out of the program in 2025 and build a brand-new station. Indeed, just on Saturday, two days after Nauka's troublesome docking, Roscosmos issued a statement saying it was continuing a study of a new station project in low Earth orbit called the Russian Orbital Service Station. This seems very likely to be posturing, as Russia has neither the budget nor likely the ability to rapidly build a new space station.
The question for NASA becomes, then, how long it is willing to rely on a partner that is clearly having technical issues with its workforce, is always asking for more money, and making noises about wanting to exit the space station partnership that has existed for about three decades now.
NASA's stated intent is to maintain a presence in low Earth orbit. By 2028 or shortly after, it hopes to have commercial space stations operating there. But until that time, the International Space Station is NASA's only game in town. Should the Russians become even less reliable, the U.S. space agency has options, but those will take time to implement.
NASA could pay a company like Axiom to accelerate development of its commercial module that will dock to the station, which could take over the propulsion tasks of the Russian Service Module now attached to the station. Or it could even give a company like SpaceX a contract to dock its Starship vehicle at the space station to maintain its altitude.
For now, it does not appear as though the NASA-Roscosmos relationship is at the breaking point, but, like the aging space station, it is showing signs of wear, tear, and cracking. Roscosmos could apply some much-needed mortar by being clear with NASA about what exactly happened with Nauka and committing to the future of the partnership.
ERIC BERGER is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA, and author of the book Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.EMAIL eric.berger@ars
Russian cosmonauts give video tour of module that jolted space station
By Reuters • Updated: 02/08/2021 -
Russian cosmonauts give video tour of module that jolted space station - Copyright Thomson Reuters 2021
MOSCOW – Russian cosmonauts have given a video tour of the interior of a research module which briefly threw the International Space Station out of control on Thursday a few hours after docking.
Russian space officials said a software glitch and possible lapse in human attention were to blame for the mishap that caused the entire space station to pitch out of its normal flight position 250 miles above the Earth with seven crew members aboard.
Footage published late on Saturday showed cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov opening the hatches and giving a short tour inside the Nauka module, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.
According to NASA‘s account of Thursday’s incident, the mission flight director immediately declared a spaceflight emergency as engineers on the ground struggled to restore stability to the sprawling research satellite.
NASA and Roscosmos each said that the seven crew members – two Russian cosmonauts, three U.S. astronauts and two others from Japan and France – were never in any immediate danger.
Roscosmos, which this week spoke of plans to launch another Russian module to the station in November, has suffered a series of mishaps and corruption scandals, including during the construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s far east where contractors were accused of embezzling state funds.
By Reuters • Updated: 02/08/2021 -
Russian cosmonauts give video tour of module that jolted space station - Copyright Thomson Reuters 2021
MOSCOW – Russian cosmonauts have given a video tour of the interior of a research module which briefly threw the International Space Station out of control on Thursday a few hours after docking.
Russian space officials said a software glitch and possible lapse in human attention were to blame for the mishap that caused the entire space station to pitch out of its normal flight position 250 miles above the Earth with seven crew members aboard.
Footage published late on Saturday showed cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov opening the hatches and giving a short tour inside the Nauka module, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.
According to NASA‘s account of Thursday’s incident, the mission flight director immediately declared a spaceflight emergency as engineers on the ground struggled to restore stability to the sprawling research satellite.
NASA and Roscosmos each said that the seven crew members – two Russian cosmonauts, three U.S. astronauts and two others from Japan and France – were never in any immediate danger.
Roscosmos, which this week spoke of plans to launch another Russian module to the station in November, has suffered a series of mishaps and corruption scandals, including during the construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s far east where contractors were accused of embezzling state funds.
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