Shortly after its middle-of-the-night meeting with the ISS, astronauts James Voss and Jeffrey Williams began preparing for a six-hour spacewalk they were to undertake late Sunday.

In orbit some 330 kilometers (209 miles) above the earth, the two men were to secure a mechanical arm that was attached to the exterior of the Unity module during a mission June of last year and has had persistent problems.

They will also install security rails to the exterior of the ISS, to help future maintenance missions, and repair an antenna.

Atlantis was launched Friday from the Kennedy Space Center on a delayed, 10-day mission to perform maintenance on the International Space Station (ISS), and load equipment onto the station for use by crews arriving later this year.

With a team of seven astronauts aboard including Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev, the shuttle blasted off at 6:11 a.m. (1011 GMT) from Cape Canaveral.

The space station, assembled in December 1998, is currently comprised of two modules -- the US-built Unity and the Russian module Zarya.

The Altantis crew will go aboard the modules on Monday, when their most urgent task will be to replace four batteries and a generator which not longer work. The batteries, hooked up to solar panels, provide the electricity the ISS needs.

They will also bring aboard smoke detectors and fans aimed at improving air flow aboard Zarya. Previous crews suffered from exposure to toxic fumes aboard the Russian module.

If Zvezda is launched as planned, there will be at least four more space flights to the station by the end of the year -- three by US shuttles and one by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The missions will be used to add new elements to the structure that will eventually weigh 450 tonnes and bring in the station's first crew -- one American and two Russians, according to space officials.

Work to finishing the giant laboratory will require some 40 space missions between now and 2005. The ISS will permanently house six and seven-member crews that will rotate after stays of about five months each.

The 60-billion-dollar project has been plagued by criticism that was boosted by a recent report of the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.

The report said the Russian modules Zarya and Zvezda were not up to US security standards and insufficiently protected from meteorites and space debris. The report also said the noise level inside Zarya was too high.

However, in the lead-up to the Atlantis launch, Bob Cabana, deputy ISS manager for international operation, assured critics that the problems would be solved.

The shuttle will move also Zarya and Unity some 32 kilometers (19 miles) further from the earth, since they lose 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) in altitude each week.

While this is Atlantis' 21st mission, the upgraded space shuttle has not flown since 1997. It is scheduled to return to Earth on May 29.

Copyright 2000 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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