A NASA flight director has provided new details about last week’s scary incident in orbit, in which a freshly docked Russian module inadvertently fired its thrusters, causing the International Space Station to roll backwards.

Russian flight controllers eventually re-gained control, but, for a 47-minute span, the situation looked dicey.

At a press conference held later that day, NASA said the space station shifted by around 45 degrees.

In an email, a NASA spokesperson said the “initial value reported by flight controllers, which was called up to the station astronauts in real time and shared via NASA tweets/live coverage, was 45 degrees.” This value, according to the spokesperson, was being reported as the event was still unfolding, that is, as Nauka, also known as the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), was still firing its thrusters and as flight controllers were continuing to change the station’s orientation.

Nauka’s thrusters had started firing, trying to pull away from a space station it was securely docked to.

With attitude control regained, the flight controllers were able to right the ship.

“The greater degree of rotation doesn’t change the outcome—all other station systems responded normally to the event and resumed regular operations once attitude control was regained,” explained the NASA spokesperson in an email.

Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the Russian segment of the ISS, said a “short-term software failure” was to blame for the incident, in which 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.”.

The loss of attitude control, he said, “risks breakup” of the entire structure