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

Following the same timeline as they will on launch day, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken put on their SpaceX flight suits and strapped inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft Saturday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Mars rovers go through seven minutes of terror when they plunge into the Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speed. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will take a more glacial approach to its asteroid target Tuesday, and the event will be more akin to four-and-a-half hours of mild anxiety for ground teams, according to the mission’s operations manager.

A towering mobile platform for the agency’s Space Launch System arrived at launch pad 39B Friday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a sequence of water and propellant flow tests, swing arm checkouts and other rehearsals that should conclude with managers declaring the spaceport’s ground systems ready to support the first SLS launch campaign by the end of the year.