Q&A with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO

NASA said Saturday that the launch of four astronauts on SpaceX’s first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station has been delayed from Oct. 31 until “no sooner than early-to-mid November,” allowing time for SpaceX to resolve an issue with Falcon 9 rocket engines that halted a recent launch attempt with a GPS navigation satellite.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin floated outside the International Space Station Wednesday, unbolted an experiment airlock from the Rassvet docking compartment and then connected it to Russia’s Nauka multi-purpose laboratory module in a 7-hour, 11-minute excursion.

SpaceX is still working on a new, safer helium tank design needed for launches with astronauts, and the debut of the company’s upgraded Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket earlier this month did not count as one of seven successful missions in “crew configuration” NASA says it requires before putting astronauts aboard the vehicle, officials said Thursday.