Q&A with Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin’s Orion program manager

Three space station crew members made final preparations Friday for undocking and landing in Kazakhstan early Saturday to close out a 186-day stay in orbit.

SpaceX test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral on Saturday in a pre-flight checkout designed to verify the launcher’s engines are ready to loft a U.S. military GPS navigation satellite into orbit Nov. 5. An engine problem forced SpaceX to abort a launch attempt in early October.

Two NASA spacecraft — the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and the New Horizons probe at the edge of the solar system — have captured their first looks at their targets as they approach a pair of primordial relics for the first time.