"We no longer have an opportunity to launch tomorrow, our earliest opportunity we are working to right now is Saturday," Leroy Caine, chairman of the mission management team, told reporters here after NASA officials held hours of discussions.

Thursday's scheduled launch was postponed hours before blast-off because of faulty fuel gauges, and the agency had hoped to reschedule it for Friday.

"At the end of our discussions today, it was our determination that we need more time" to address the problem, Cain said. "I asked the team to posture us with an opportunity to fly as early as Saturday ... It's a very complex situation."

earlier related report
NASA postponed the planned launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from Friday to Saturday, due to a "complex" technical glitch just hours before it was due to blast off.

"We no longer have an opportunity to launch tomorrow, our earliest opportunity we are working to right now is Saturday," Leroy Caine, chairman of the mission management team, (MMT) told reporters here after NASA officials held hours of discussions.

Earlier, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had postponed the launch 24 hours until Friday.

The problem, which came to light before the craft was due to take off Thursday on its 11-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS), concerned two of the four gauges on the shuttle's external fuel tanks.

The two gauges were showing that the fuel tank was empty when in fact it was almost full. A similar problem with the gauges occurred in July 2005, delaying a launch of the Discovery shuttle for a week.

NASA at first said it was confident it could fix the glitch promptly.

"At the end of our discussions today," Craine said later, "it was our determination that we need more time" to address the problem.

"I asked the team to posture us with an opportunity to fly as early as Saturday ... It's a very complex situation," he added.

The faulty gauges are responsible for cutting off the shuttle's three cryogenic engines when the main fuel tank is empty. A faulty switch could prematurely stop, damage or even cause an explosion in the three engines.

NASA said the gauges began being tested after the external fuel was emptied.

The MMT will next meet Friday at 2:00 pm (1900 GMT) to evaluate the repairs and decide on whether the Saturday 3:43 pm (2043 GMT) launch should go ahead.

Weather forecasts said there was a 60 percent chance of good weather for the liftoff.

NASA said the Atlantis' launch could be rescheduled during an eight-day period ending on December 13. After that, the next launch window will be in early January.

Atlantis will ferry a seven-strong crew including Frenchman Leopold Eyharts and German Hans Schlegel to the ISS and will also deliver a European laboratory to be installed on the space station.

Eyharts will stay behind on the ISS for two and a half months to prepare the European Columbus laboratory for future scientific work, while Schlegel will carry out two of three spacewalks planned for the Atlantis mission.

He will be accompanied by US astronaut Rex Walheim, who will help Schlegel attach the Columbus laboratory to the Harmony module, which was delivered to the ISS during the shuttle Discovery's 15-day mission that ended November 7.

Schlegel said his mission will mark "a tremendous step" for Europe. "We are becoming a more important partner for the international spaceflight community."

With Columbus, Europe hopes to become an integral part of the only functioning orbital outpost, where scientific experiments with microgravity are considered essential to prepare humans for long-term living and working in space and subsequent journeys towards Mars and beyond.

Columbus will allow astronauts to conduct hundreds of experiments a year, notably in areas of biotechnology, medicine, materials and fluids.

The Japanese laboratory Kibo, the fourth planned component of the ISS which is to be the largest and most sophisticated of all, should be delivered in three shuttle flights beginning in February 2008. It will also be attached to the Harmony module.

During the third spacewalk of the Atlantis mission, Walheim and Stanley Coils will set up two research platforms outside of Columbus: SOLAR, a solar observatory and EuTEF (European Technology Exposure Facility), which will help conduct eight different research experiments aimed at studies of life in space.

Designed to be carried in the hold of the shuttle, the European laboratory is cylindrical, 6.87 meters (yards) long and 4.49 meters in diameter. Columbus weighs more than 10 tons when empty and 19 tons fully loaded.

It can accommodate up to three people and carry 10 research equipment units.

Construction of the space laboratory, which cost 1.3 billion euros, began in 1992.

NASA said a fourth space walk could be added to the Atlantis mission to inspect a faltering mechanism in one of three solar panels serving the ISS station, which would extend the shuttle's stay in orbit.

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