Q&A with Mark Mulqueen, Boeing’s space station program manager

Veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and rookie flight engineer Jack Fischer streaked into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz ferry craft Thursday, chased down the International Space Station and glided to a smooth docking to complete a six-hour rendezvous.

Mission control halted the expansion of Bigelow Aerospace’s experimental space station module Thursday after the structure did not grow as predicted when air began flowing into it.

A Russian cosmonaut, a NASA astronaut and a British flier strapped into a Soyuz spacecraft, undocked from International Space Station and plunged back to Earth Saturday, safely landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 186-day mission.