Russian spaceship docks despite engine failure

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Astronauts on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft were forced to manually dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday after an engine failure knocked out the automatic docking system, Russian space officials said.

The shuttle is carrying U.S. billionaire and Microsoft developer Charles Simonyi, who may become one of the last civilians to be taken to the ISS as the financial crisis hampers efforts to expand the space fleet, Vitaly Lopota, head of space corporation Energiya, told a briefing.

The malfunction, which occurred when the ship was less than 100 meters from the ISS, will force Energiya to review the algorithms behind the docking system it programs into its ships, Lopota said.

"At one point, one of the engines gave out, and the computer system decided that this loss was quite serious and went into the so-called retreat mode," Vladimir Solovyov, the chief of Russian mission control, told the briefing.

"We asked the crew not to allow the retreat, and to take matters into their own hands. After the captain of the crew decided that the engine was working well enough...we gave him permission to go into manual mode," Solovyov, a veteran cosmonaut, said.

Russia's Gennady Padalka, the captain of the ship, manually docked it at 1304 GMT, nine minutes ahead of schedule, and both the crew and the vessel are fine, mission control said.

"The situation was never out of control," Lopota added.

Concerns have been raised about the safety of the Soyuz TMA spacecrafts before because some of the most recent re-entries have not gone smoothly. There were so-called "ballistic" landings where the entry into the atmosphere was steeper than usual, exposing the crews to intense gravitational force.

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Hungarian-born Simonyi, 60, made his fortune developing software at Microsoft and has now made history as the first space tourist to make the journey twice.

But as Russia increases the size of the crews it sends to the ISS, there will be no more room for space tourists, even though they pay tens of millions of dollars for the privilege of joining a mission.

Adding a fifth craft to the Russian fleet has also become unfeasible as credit markets dry up, blocking access to loans that help pay for the complex feats of engineering, Lopota said.

"Normally we would take financial resources from banks...but the current financial situation is not allowing us to do that," he said.

"Additional financial decisions must be made to open up these possibilities, and if these decisions are taken, then another ship could be ready in two and a half to three years," Lopota added.

Russia has borne the brunt of sending crews and cargo to the multinational ISS since the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in 2003, killing its crew of seven.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)