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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA power outage disrupted communication between Mission Control and the International Space Station on Tuesday.

Mission Control couldn’t send commands to the station and talk with the seven astronauts in orbit. The power outage hit as upgrade work was underway in the building at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Space station program manager Joel Montelbano said neither the astronauts nor station were ever in any danger and that backup control systems took over within 90 minutes. The crew was notified of the problem through Russian communication systems, within 20 minutes of the outage.

Technicians remove lifting lugs after placing the Space Shuttle Endeavour's Solid Rocket Aft Skirts on top of a seismic isolator pad in the Shuttle Gallery of at the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center in Los Angeles, Thursday, July 20, 2023. The 20-story tall display which is currently under construction will stand atop an 1,800-ton concrete slab supported by so-called base isolators to protect Endeavour from earthquakes. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

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Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3, the word for "moon craft" in Sanskrit, blasts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, Friday, July 14, 2023. The Indian spacecraft blazed its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface, the country's space agency said. A successful landing would make India the fourth country, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, to achieve the feat. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

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It’s the first time NASA has had to fire up these backup systems to take control, according to Montelbano. He said NASA hoped to resolve the issue and be back to normal operations by the end of the day.

NASA maintains a backup control center miles from Houston in the event a hurricane or other disaster requiring evacuations. But in Tuesday’s case, the flight controllers stayed at Mission Control since the lights and air-conditioning still worked.

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