Live coverage: Russian-American-British crew launches toward space station

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship set for liftoff Saturday will deliver to the International Space Station the final hardware for a series of ambitious spacewalks later this month to install a new coolant system on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle physics experiment seeking the cosmic signatures of dark matter and antimatter.

Space station commander Peggy Whitson and astronaut Jack Fischer are set for a two-and-a-half hour spacewalk Tuesday, a quickly-planned excursion to replace a recently installed external computer that failed Saturday.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said NASA will continue working with Boeing to make the Starliner a viable crew transport vehicle, adding that “sustained crew and cargo access to low Earth orbit will remain essential, and America benefits from competition and redundancy.”