Crazy Happenings

Space Shuttle Atlantis sits on launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photograph: Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

Nasa has called off today’s launch of the space shuttle Atlantis after detecting problems with fuel gauges in the shuttle’s external tank.

The launch has tentatively been rescheduled for tomorrow, NASA said.

Two of the four sensors in the shuttle’s liquid hydrogen tank indicated that the tank was dry, even though there was fuel inside. Three sensors must be working properly to fly, NASA spokesman Paul Foerman said.

The sensors are critical to ensure that the shuttle’s three main engines don’t shut down too soon or too late during liftoff.

Atlantis had been due to blast off from Kennedy Space Centre this evening on a mission to deliver Europe’s long-delayed science lab to the International Space Station.

Officials at the space agency had given the all-clear for a 4.31pm (21.31 GMT) liftoff from Cape Canaveral following emergency repairs to patch up gouges in the insulating foam that shrouds the shuttle’s 15-storey main fuel tank.

The launch of the €1bn (£700m) Columbus laboratory will end an agonising wait for scientists and engineers, some of whom have dedicated more than 20 years to the project. For several of those, the lab has languished in a warehouse in Germany, grounded by a string of funding cuts and accidents which severely set back its construction. When the lab was conceived in the early 1980s, scientists expected it would be aloft and running by 1992.

The shuttle had been due to reach the space station on Saturday for a 17,500mph rendezvous 213 miles above the Earth.