The accident-prone crew of Russia's Mir space station finally arrested their tumble through space yesterday, locking the crippled ship's solar panels onto the Sun and switching the lights back on.
But the latest calamity, caused by a weary crewman crashing the on-board computer on Thursday, seems to have convinced controllers effectively to stand down the three cosmonauts, one of whom now has heart trouble, and wait for a relief crew to repair damage caused in the collision last month.
The deputy mission director, Mr Sergei Krikalyov, said it was "very likely" that the risky and complex rewiring job, already put off until next week because of Cmdr Vasily Tsibliyev's stress-induced palpitations, would now have to wait until after the relief crew reached Mir on August 7th.
Cmdr Tsibliyev and Flight Engineer Alexander Lazutkin are due to return to Earth on August 26th, while the NASA physicist, Mr Michael Foale, is to go home aboard a US shuttle in September. A meeting of officials at Mission Control outside Moscow on Monday may decide, however, that their missions are already all but over, leaving them serving out the rest of their time on the stricken station as little more than caretakers.
Russian officials, whose agency depends on the foreign cash Mir brings in to keep the post-Soviet space industry aloft, have resisted suggestions the three abandon ship immediately. An empty Mir would soon expire and crash back to Earth.
Two fresh Russian cosmonauts, Pavel Vinogradov and Anatoly Solovyov, are already in training near Moscow for the dangerous job of entering the airless Spektr module involved in last month's collision. They will have to mend cables cut after the accident and make a spacewalk to patch the puncture.
Mir has been on half power for the past three weeks, forcing the present crew to abandon their experiments and live a highly restricted, twilight existence.
If Cmdr Lazutkin and Mr Foale are told to abandon plans to make the cable repairs themselves, then officials said the French scientist Mr Leopold Eyharts would probably no longer fly with Cosmonauts Solovyov and Vinogradov when they blast off on August 5th.