Nasa officials reported that the International Space Station (ISS) was briefly driven out of control on Thursday when the jet thrusters of a freshly arrived Russian research module accidentally fired a few hours after it was connected to the orbiting station.

According to Nasa and Russian state-owned news agency RIA, 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.

The issue, however, forced Nasa to postpone the launch of Boeing's new CST-100 Starliner capsule on an uncrewed demonstration voyage to the space station until at least 3 August. The Starliner was supposed to launch on Friday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center atop an Atlas V rocket.

The disaster happened three hours after the multipurpose Nauka module was attached to the space station on Thursday.

According to US space agency authorities, the module's jets unexpectedly reactivated, forcing the entire station to pitch out of its regular flight position 400 kilometers above the Earth.

According to Joel Montalbano, manager of Nasa's space station program, the "loss of attitudinal control" lasted about 45 minutes before flight teams on the ground were able to restore the space station's orientation by igniting thrusters on another module of the orbiting platform.

Nasa specialists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, were quoted by RIA in its aired coverage of the incident as portraying the effort to recover control of the space station as a "tug of war" between the two modules.

The station was pitching out of alignment at a rate of nearly half a degree per second throughout the incident, according to Montalbano, who spoke with reporters hours later on a Nasa conference call.

Nasa stated that the Nauka engines were eventually turned off, the space station was stabilized, and its orientation was restored to where it had started.

During the disturbance, communication with the crew was lost twice, but "there was no immediate danger at any time to the crew" Montalbano stated.

Automatic sensors on the ground first identified a shift in the space station's typical orientation, and "the crew really didn't feel any movement" he said.

The cause of the thruster failure on the Nauka module, delivered by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, is yet unknown, according to Nasa officials.

There was no obvious sign of damage to the space station, according to Montalbano. He admitted that the flight correction maneuvers burned up more propellant reserves than he had anticipated, but that it was "but nothing I would worry about"

The module had a number of difficulties after its launch last week from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, raising concerns about whether the docking procedure would proceed well.

According to the TASS news agency, Roscosmos blamed Thursday's post-docking issue on the Nauka's engines having to work with leftover fuel in the ship.

The Nauka module is a research facility, storage unit, and airlock that will improve Russia's capabilities aboard the International Space Station.

The module, called after the Russian word for "science," docked with the space station a few minutes later than planned, according to live transmission.

"According to telemetry data and reports from the ISS crew, the onboard systems of the station and the Nauka module are operating normally," Roscosmos said in a statement, citing telemetry data and reports from the ISS crew.

"There is contact!!!" exclaims the narrator. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, posted on Twitter shortly after the docking.