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

Eight days after a dramatic spacewalk to inspect the site of a leak in the hull of his Soyuz ferry ship, Russian commander Sergey Prokopyev, German flight engineer Alexander Gerst and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor geared up to depart the International Space Station Wednesday for a fiery plunge back to Earth.

The next liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been reset for no earlier than Feb. 8, NOAA and NASA officials said Tuesday, apparently to give the launch provider more time to prepare for the mission.

A new era in GPS navigation launched Sunday, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbed into orbit with a Lockheed Martin-built satellite designed to beam higher-power positioning, navigation and timing signals around the world, providing military and civilian users with more accurate data that is more resistant to growing jamming threats.