Russian engineers failed on Friday to fix malfunctioning navigational computers on the orbiting International Space Station but said they did not foresee having to evacuate the three crew.
The computers, some of which control thrusters that help keep the $100 billion station in a stable orbit, broke down on Wednesday shortly after the crew of the visiting US space Shuttle Atlantis installed a new solar array for power.
"We have not so far managed to fully restore the computers," Nikolai Sevastyanov, chief constructor at Russian space company RKK Energiya, told a news conference at mission control in the town of Korolyov near Moscow. "Tomorrow we'll try turning on secondary power sources using a new method. If that does not work we will not try again."
Space officials said it was so-called secondary power sources that had failed, rather than the German-built computers themselves or the Russian software that they run on. If Saturday's attempts fail again, the Russian space programme may launch a Progress supply ship from its cosmodrome in Baikonur in Kazakhstan on July 23, two weeks earlier than planned, with new power supplies on board, Sevastyanov said.
NASA had said that a failure to fix the computers could force a temporary evacuation of the space station, a 16-nation project which has been continuously manned since November 2, 2000. The six computers were restarted on Thursday and worked for three hours before breaking down again, Russian media reported.