VIDEO: Expedition 42-43 mission preview

A European supply freighter is set to undock from the International Space Station on Saturday, heading for a destructive dive into Earth’s atmosphere about 30 hours later after a power system failure forced the cancellation of an experiment to observe the dynamics of the re-entry of a large spacecraft.

Soyuz TMA-15M commander Anton Shkaplerov, flanked on the left by flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti and on the right by NASA astronaut Terry Virts, are scheduled for liftoff from complex 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday.

The dream of a self-sufficient space-faring civilization moved a step closer to reality as a commercial 3D printer was installed aboard the International Space Station for a tryout in orbit.