Video: Change of command aboard International Space Station

With three space station fliers safely back on Earth after a pinpoint landing Sunday, three fresh crew members made final preparations for launch Wednesday from Kazakhstan to boost the lab’s crew back to six.

Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station early Thursday and performed what amounted to hand transplant surgery on the lab’s Canadian-built robot arm, removing a crippled grapple fixture on one end of the space crane and replacing it with an on-board spare.

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.