NASA's Power Outage Causes Temporary Loss of Contact with Space Station

NASA experienced a brief power outage at its mission control center in Houston, resulting in a voice communications blackout with the International Space Station (ISS). The outage lasted for about 90 minutes and was caused by a ground problem during preplanned power system upgrades. The astronauts aboard the ISS were not in danger, as NASA was able to communicate with them using Russian systems within 20 minutes. The outage only affected the first floor of the mission control building and impacted key communications hardware. This was the first time NASA activated the backup control hardware at Johnson Space Center's Building 30, and the agency will investigate the incident to learn from it.