New Russian lab's thrusters briefly knock space station out of orientation

A heavyweight Russian laboratory module that experienced a variety of problems after launch last week docked at the International Space Station on Thursday. But in a moment of unexpected drama, inadvertent thruster firings briefly knocked the sprawling complex out of its normal orientation.

Space station program manager Joel Montalbano said the station was maintaining its orientation, or "attitude," using massive NASA-supplied gyroscopes when the thruster firings suddenly began at 12:34 p.m. EDT, about three hours after the 44,000-pound Nauka multi-purpose laboratory glided in for docking. The gyros were unable to counteract the unwanted push from Nauka's jets, and the space station, stretching the length of a football field with a mass of more than 930,000 pounds, began tilting away from its normal orientation.