NASA / Shane Kimbrough
After an 8-day voyage in low-Earth orbit, Russia's Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) reached the International Space Station (ISS) at 9:29 AM, EDT (6:29 AM, PDT) today...but not without incident.
Hours after it successfully docked at the ISS (using its Kurs automated docking system), Nauka began firing its thrusters—even though they should've been shut down immediately after the 22-ton spacecraft mated with the nadir port on Russia's Zvezda module.
The errant thruster firings were extensive to the point that the ISS became tilted 45 degrees from its normal attitude...prompting Roscosmos to rely on Zvezda and the Progress MS-17 freighter to restore attitude control by firing their own thrusters to counter Nauka's aberrant behavior. This action was successful, even though the space station crewmembers were ordered to close all window shutters as a precaution during this operation.
Misson controllers later found out that Nauka's flight computer was still configured for docking procedures, so they waited till the ISS passed over a Russian ground station to command the MLM's computer to deactivate all thrusters.
The ISS astronauts were never in danger during Nauka's misfirings, but these were enough to force NASA to delay tomorrow's launch of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule on Orbital Flight Test (OFT)-2 to no earlier than next Tuesday, August 3.
Already at the pad, Starliner and its Atlas V rocket will be rolled back to the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 to await the next launch attempt.
If Starliner lifts off on August 3, T-0 would be at 1:20 PM, EDT (10:20 AM, PDT)—during an instantaneous launch window.
Roscosmos / Oleg Novitskiy
NASA TV
United Launch Alliance
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