Q&A with Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA

Boeing’s work on the International Space Station, the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew capsule and NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System are under the umbrella of John Elbon, who leads the company’s space exploration division in Houston.

Kicking off United Launch Alliance’s ambitious 2016 with as many as 15 launches planned for the U.S. military, intelligence community, NASA and commercial clients, an Atlas 5 rocket will thunder to orbit Friday to deploy the last satellite in the current generation of GPS navigation spacecraft.

Guglielmo Aglietti is the director of the Surrey Space Center in Britain, and he leads a team of scientists and engineers who developed an experiment named RemoveDebris to demonstrate techniques to approach, capture and remove space junk from orbit.