Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

NASA is gearing up for an intense few weeks of work aboard the International Space Station, staging three spacewalks, moving a docking port from one module to another to support commercial crew ferry ships and capturing an Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo ship carrying nearly 4 tons of equipment and supplies.

A U.S. Army veteran of Operation Desert Storm, a Russian Air Force MiG-29 fighter pilot, and a former flight controller for Russia’s Mir space station arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, with a smooth docking aboard a Soyuz spaceship at 0952 GMT (5:52 a.m. EDT), two days after a successful launch from Kazakhstan.

This was just the second time that SpaceX opted to launch 29 of its Starlink V2 Mini satellites in one batch, the current limit for the Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff of the Starlink 10-37 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 UTC).