VIDEO: Expedition 42-43 mission preview

NASA space station managers decided Thursday to delay the first two of three planned spacewalks by one day to give flight controllers and engineers a chance to catch their collective breath after exhaustive troubleshooting to verify the health of critical internal spacesuit components.

A European supply freighter is set to undock from the International Space Station on Saturday, heading for a destructive dive into Earth’s atmosphere about 30 hours later after a power system failure forced the cancellation of an experiment to observe the dynamics of the re-entry of a large spacecraft.

Inside the final assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft is mated to the core of the Soyuz booster rocket for Sunday’s Expedition 42 launch to the International Space Station.