The US Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, promised continued US support for the beleaguered Mir space station yesterday. He pledged in Moscow to pursue space co-operation with Russia despite another major computer failure aboard the orbiting station.
But Mr Gore said the US space shuttle Atlantis would blast off for Sunday's scheduled link-up with Mir only if Washington was satisfied with safety guarantees for US astronauts working on the 11year-old station, ITAR-TASS news agency reported.
Despite the latest incidents, Mr Gore and the Russian Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, had agreed to continue joint space efforts, following an expert report on the Mir project, ITAR-TASS quoted Russian Space Agency director Mr Yuri Koptev as saying. "So the joint programme on board Mir will continue in full."
The pledge came on a day of an embarrassing series of technical problems aboard Mir, including the fourth breakdown of Mir's main computer in as many weeks, a gas cloud near the escape module and a broken air ventilator.
The on-board computer keeps Mir facing the sun, enabling its solar panels to power the orbiting station. Docking would be virtually impossible if the computer could not keep Mir stationary, a Russian space official said.
However, mission control spokeswoman Ms Vera Medvedkova said the Atlantis-Mir link-up "has not yet been put back". The computer would be repaired, "probably in a day or two", she said, enabling the Atlantis mission to go ahead.
Meanwhile, Mir's crew were using a back-up oxygen system, having turned off the main generator and non-essential equipment to conserve power, although Ms Medvedkova insisted "the safety of the crew is not in danger."
Critics in the US Congress have condemned Russia's space safety record, saying the string of incidents aboard Mir endangered the lives of US astronauts participating in joint missions.
NASA is paying $473 million over five years to keep US astronauts aboard Mir - finance which is vital to the Russian space effort.
However, a recent NASA report criticised conditions on Mir, saying the over-heated station had carbon dioxide levels which impaired the crew's ability to think, and warned that crews had insufficient training to use Mir's emergency escape craft.
Yesterday's computer failure is becoming a regular occurrence on the troubled space craft, the latest being the third Monday in a row that Mir's main computer has crashed.
Atlantis is to deliver one of two new back-up computers ordered to overcome the main computer's deficiencies. The second will arrive aboard a cargo vessel in October.