CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Shuttle Endeavours astronauts hauled the International Space Station (ISS) into a higher orbit Friday while U.S. and Russian officials haggled over a NASA request to delay the planned launch Saturday of a Soyuz taxi crew that includes U.S. millionaire Dennis Tito.
As it stands, the Soyuz crew remains scheduled to blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan about 3:30 a.m. EDT (07:30 GMT), taking off on a two-day trip that would lead to a docking at the 17-story outpost around 4 a.m. EDT (08:00 GMT) Monday.
NASA wants the Russians to delay the launch at least a day so that engineers can fix ongoing outpost computer problems. The shuttle astronauts, meanwhile, still face a flurry of stalled work before they can meet all mission objectives.
Whats more, the U.S. space agency is concerned that a Soyuz docking at the station while Endeavour is there would bring the bug-shaped Russian ship "uncomfortably close" to the tail of the winged NASA spaceship.
The Russians, however, appear to be taking a hard stance on the matter, saying that the Soyuz launch will take place as scheduled despite NASAs request to extend Endeavours station stay by two days and delay the Russian taxi flight 24 hours.
Yuri Semyonov, the director general of Russian aerospace giant RSC Energia, told ITAR-Tass that the launch will take place as scheduled.
"The blastoff decision confirmed today regarding the crew, which includes the first space tourist Dennis Tito, is final," Semyonov told the Russian news agency. "The Americans should solve the problems theyre having on the ISS themselves."
NASA officials, however, say negotiations are continuing. Sources told SPACE.com that NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin and Yuri Koptev, director general of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, started talks Friday and that those discussions are expected to continue through the day.
NASA mission managers will meet at Johnson Space Center in Houston at 6 p.m. EDT (22:00 GMT) to discuss the situation. A news media briefing is expected to held at JSC at the end of that meeting.
At issue for the Russians, meanwhile, are several matters.
The Soyuz rocket that will carry Tito and two veteran Russian cosmonauts to the station is fully fueled and the three-man spacecraft mounted on top already has been powered up.
Consequently, sources told SPACE.com that the Soyuz must be launched within the next several days or the rocket will have to be returned to its processing hangar for weeks of refurbishment work.
Whats more, sources say the Russians already are evacuating downrange regions where the rockets spent stages are expected to fall during its an eight-minute climb into orbit.
Any delay in the launch would prove costly because the downrange region would have to remain clear for longer than originally anticipated, both U.S. and Russian sources said.
NASA ground engineers, meanwhile, continued struggling to recover all three of the stations main command-and-control computers, which inexplicably failed earlier this week.
One of the three is running and engineers were able to synch it up with two linked computers that were powered up again in the stations U.S. Unity module after shutting down Thursday. That work enabled engineers to restart a station radio communication system that has been off line since the initial computer shutdown.
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