Q&A with Guido Levrini, ESA’s manager of the Copernicus space segment

A workhorse Soyuz booster thundered to life and climbed into a dark Kazakh sky Friday, carrying NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko on a four-orbit voyage to the International Space Station to kick off a marathon 342-day mission, the longest flight ever attempted by an American.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked at the International Space Station early Friday, boosting the lab’s crew to nine for the next week and providing a ride home next March for two station crew members who are only halfway through a nearly yearlong stay aboard the lab complex.

Heino Falcke, an accomplished radio astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands, leads a team of European scientists and engineers who developed a scientific receiver flying on China’s Queqiao spacecraft flying to a point in space beyond the far side of the moon.