Astronauts manning the International Space Station were hurried into an escape space ship over the weekend as cautionary measure against oncoming space junks, reports said.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that six astronauts were ordered by NASA to evacuate the space station and transfer into two Russian Soyuz spacecrafts, which the U.S. space agency said were capable of transporting the space crews back to earth.

NASA officials admitted that the space debris, which has emerged as major concerns for man's safe above Earth activities, were belatedly spotted on Friday and left no time for the crew members to manoeuvre the space station out of harm's way.

The travelling junks, which The NY Times said, were part of a long-jettisoned Russian space junks came about nine miles near the path of the space station but eventually passed over without causing any trouble.

It would have been catastrophic had the two space objects came any nearer as NASA disclosed that each of them travel at around speeds of 17,500 miles an hour.

As soon as the danger was deemed over, the astronauts were advised to return to their posts in the space station, NASA officials said.

NASA identified the six-man crew as Donald R. Pettit and Daniel C. Burbank from the United States; Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin and Oleg Kononenko from Russia and André Kuipers from The Netherlands.

Alarms have been sounded before on the imminent dangers that space junks, which accumulated though years of many nations' activities above Earth's atmosphere, pose not only the space station but on other satellites hovering the planet.

Most of the debris were composed of old satellites that had outlived their usefulness and had been destroyed by their operators - either countries or private entities.

They were left floating within 1,250 miles of Earth's low orbit, The NY Times said, and serve as threats to existing and future space explorations.

According to the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, more than 22,000 space junks have been under its close monitoring, with over a thousand of them still intact spacecrafts that were long abandoned.

Majority of the orbiting materials were said to be no more than four inches, result of previous efforts to obliterate them into smaller pieces, though the National Research Council has been cautioning that even specks of the floating garbage could lead to disastrous accidents.

Scientists have proposed deflecting the junks by use of laser, pushing them into trajectories that would eliminate perils on human activities within the low orbit area.