Space station crew has close call with space junk

— -- The three crewmembers of the International Space Station had to hurriedly take refuge Thursday in an escape pod because a piece of space junk passed dangerously close.

Normally Mission Control would have fired the station's steering rockets to move the facility out of harm's way, but engineers learned about the debris too late to dodge it, said NASA spokeswoman Nicole Cloutier.

The debris was projected to whistle by the station within the "red box" distance of 3.6 miles that requires NASA to take action. The crew — Americans Mike Fincke and Sandra Magnus and Russian Yury Lonchakov— were able to return to the space station after the debris safely passed.

The debris was about a 5 inches in diameter and came from a U.S. rocket that launched in 1993 carrying a satellite into orbit, said Gene Stansbery, orbital debris program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The space station and debris were traveling more than 22,000 mph relative to each other. If the space junk had struck the station, it could have caused rapid decompression.

In December, the residents of the station also took shelter in their escape ship, a Russian spacecraft called the Soyuz. In that case, the debris sailed past at a distance of 11 miles. The capsule is parked at the space station to serve as a lifeboat if needed.