Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The International Space Station has regained contact with NASA controllers after three hours of quiet.

Officials say the six crew members and the station are fine, and that there were no problems during the brief outage.

A NASA spokesman says something went wrong this morning during a computer software update on the station. The outpost abruptly lost all communication with Houston.

It was restored less than three hours later.

The station's commander, Kevin Ford, was able to briefly radio Moscow while the station was flying over Russia.

A NASA spokesman says in the past few weeks, the space station had been purposely simulating communications delays and downtimes, in preparation for a future Mars mission. The spokesman says this wasn't part of those tests, but that the experience may prove useful.

(Copyright 2013, The Associated Press)