Space station computers rebooted, partial power restored

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Russian computers that control the international space station's orientation and oxygen and water supplies were partly working again Thursday after failing the day before.

Flight controllers in Moscow were able to re-establish some communication with the computers overnight, and Russian engineers were working Thursday to restore the rest of the system, NASA space station flight director Holly Ridings said.

"They've made a lot of progress," she said. "There are some cleanup steps to do still and some investigation."

Officials with NASA and the Russian space agency still don't know why the computers went down. They had never seen that type of failure on the space station before, and they believe it may be related to electrical power rather than computer software.

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Weren't they running Vista in there?

Jokes aside, not much of an escape when you are up there huh? Them rather than I, I wouldn't want to be up there at all!

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They had never seen that type of failure on the space station before, and they believe it may be related to electrical power rather than computer software.

I'm pretty much sure they run some kind of Unix/Linux, NASA and JPL are big Unix/Linux users.