The piece of orbital space junk that forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station on Thursday was bigger than originally reported, Reuters cited NASA officials as announcing today. The object, identified as a piece of rocket engine that flew in 1993, was about 5 inches (12.7 cm) in diameter, not .35 inches (0.89 cm). Had it struck one of the pressurized modules aboard the $100 billion space station, the crew would have had only 10 minutes of air, said NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries. NASA had expected the debris to come as close as 2.8 miles (4.5 km) to the station. As of Friday, officials still did not know exactly how close it came. Radars used to keep track of debris in orbit will first have to get another good fix on its location, said Gene Stansbery, the orbital debris program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
