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

A collection chamber that could contain more than 2 pounds of samples gathered from an asteroid in deep space last week has been sealed inside of a return capsule on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to bring the extraterrestrial specimens back to Earth in 2023, officials announced Thursday.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Monday, delivering nearly four tons of supplies and experiments to the research lab and its crew, including a $23 million titanium toilet and a high-definition virtual reality camera planned for use on a future spacewalk.

Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, took another step toward launching people to the edge of space Wednesday with a test flight of its New Shepard booster and crew capsule over West Texas. “It’s time,” Bezos wrote on Instagram after the flight, suggesting Blue Origin plans to move forward with suborbital launches carrying human passengers above the atmosphere.