People might wonder why attitude control is important. First and foremost: power. Solar power requires that the solar arrays be directed toward the sun. Losing attitude control means that they'll lose efficiency and thus power. This isn't a big deal in the short run, but long term is a big deal. Surely they'll have this fixed before that comes into play.<p>Aside from that, there's a lot of other smaller factors such as being able to orient the station to boost orbit every so often. Even though they're in Low Earth Orbit, there is a <i>just</i> enough atmosphere to cause the orbit to decay slightly over time, and this has to be compensated for by boosting the orbit. No attitude control = no orienting thrusters.<p>Obligatory Scott Manley video that's way better than what I just said:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDp8jbP_22c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDp8jbP_22c</a>
Seems like they're out of the immediate problem area: <a href="https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1420798716554928132" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1420798716554928132</a><p>Still lots of investigation to do and probably a permanent fix incoming, but no big risk of them falling out of the sky right now.
Being reported as a flight computer state machine fault. <a href="https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1420804282685792261" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/14208042826857922...</a>
Aside: Today I learned about the existence of "video.ibm.com" which seems to be where NASA now streams its live video. I'd never heard of it before.<p>Live ISS stream: <a href="https://video.ibm.com/channel/live-iss-stream" rel="nofollow">https://video.ibm.com/channel/live-iss-stream</a>
(Currently no video, intermittent audio.)
for people curious, when that website is not broken <a href="https://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/download/IDSS_IDD_Revision_E_TAGGED.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/download/IDSS_I...</a> , there is the list of the moment of inertia of the ISS around various axes and the force and torque limits a docking ship as to respect.