The impact of Hurricane Ike on the International Space Station

The storm disrupted the schedule of the International Space Station and the docking of the Progress supply spacecraft at the station was postponed to Wednesday with the consent of the Russians

NASA reports that Hurricane Ike forced the agency to close NASA's main control room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and transfer control of the various missions to alternate facilities near Austin, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama.

Since the Houston Space Center is responsible for operating many of the space station's systems, the Americans and the Russians agreed to postpone the docking of the Progress supply spacecraft to the International Space Station for several days. Currently, the transition to alternative facilities forced the postponement of the docking of the Progress spacecraft at the space station from Friday (yesterday) to this Wednesday.

The unmanned supply spacecraft of the Progress class equipping the space station regularly. The latest spacecraft was launched from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on Thursday (September 11) carrying 2.5 tons of oxygen, water, food, supplies, equipment and gifts for the station's crew, including refurbished Russian-made spacesuits.

The space station crew, Sergey Volkov, Oleg Kononko, and Greg Chemitov won't get their new spacesuits in time, and all they have left to do is Follow after the storm and deliver vital meteorological information to teams on the ground.

Hurricane Ike has killed more than a hundred people in the Caribbean and is gaining momentum in its journey through the Gulf of Mexico. On Saturday morning Israel time she crossed the coastline near Galvin Island near Houston. and later passed over the city itself. The damage to property was many, but to the soul apparently few. This is because close to a million people along the Texas coast have been ordered to evacuate. It is still unclear what happened to the NASA facilities, whether they were flooded like large parts of the city (the Johnson Space Center is in a relatively low area) and whether the power outages that occurred after many power cables were cut in the storm also reached there.