The impact of Hurricane Ike has reached out into space and delayed the planned Friday arrival of a Russian cargo ship at the international space station.

The unmanned Russian space freighter Progress 30 was slated to arrive at the space station at 5:01 p.m. Friday, but flight controllers at NASA’s Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had yet to move the orbiting laboratory’s expansive solar arrays into position for the docking before closing down Thursday to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Ike.

“The Russians and NASA came to an agreement today to postpone docking until Wednesday,” said John Yembrick, a NASA spokesman at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. NASA has setup a backup Mission Control teams for the space station near Austin, Texas and in Huntsville, Alabama. Yembrick said that the main Mission Control room in Houston is preferred to feather the space stations’s US solar arrays into an edge-on position to incoming spacecraft to avoid damage from thruster firings.

If required, the agency could command the solar array movement from a backup center, but mission managers preferred to wait until Wednesday and allow time for NASA personnel to evacuate, Yembrick said.

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Hurricane Ike was a Category 2 storm centered about 400 miles (645 kilometers) east-southeast of Galveston, Texas, and was expected to strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center.