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

Top officials from NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, could decide soon to commit to keeping the International Space Station staffed and flying through at least 2028, four years after the research lab’s current retirement date.

China’s Tiangong 2 space lab, a precursor to the country’s planned space station, is scheduled to fall out of orbit Friday and plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere for a destructive re-entry.

Aiming to reduce risk and costs, NASA has decided to launch the first two modules of the Gateway station in lunar orbit on the same heavy-lift rocket in 2023, rather than fly them on separate rockets and dock them together in deep space, according to the the agency’s chief human spaceflight manager.