A spacecraft with American and Russian crew members has been delayed from arriving at the International Space Station due to a software glitch, NASA said.
The spacecraft Soyuz, carrying two Russians and one American, was scheduled to land Wednesday morning after taking off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Associated Press reported.
But shortly before the six hour journey was over, an engine that was supposed to burn for 24 seconds, which is needed to change the spacecraft's orbit, "did not occur as planned," NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, told the AP.
The rocket, which has since been suspended in orbit, is scheduled to dock at the ISS on Thursday at 7:58 p.m. EDT. The Russian space agency is working on fixing the glitch before Thursday's arrival time, said Oleg Ostapenko, head of Roscosmos, the AP reported.
The crew on board- including NASA's Steve Swanson and Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev, are unharmed.
"The crew have taken off their spacesuits and are continuing their flight normally," Ostapenko said according to the BBC.
While the crew is in outer space, relations between the U.S. and Russia are tense on Earth. President Barack Obama has worked tirelessly to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to back out of Ukraine, where Russian troops are still stationed after Russia annexed the peninsula Crimea from Ukraine earlier this month.
But the tension has not reached the astronauts aboard the Soyuz. Dinners aboard the ISS will be "an opportunity to come together as friends in the kitchen and look each other in the eye," the astronauts said at a press conference before blast off, the BBC reported.
NASA has relied on Russia for space travel to the ISS ever since it retired U.S. space shuttles in 2011, the AP reported. NASA pays Russia close to $71 million for each passenger.
