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

The four astronauts will spend more than nine days onboard their Orion spacecraft and is poised to pass the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B is scheduled for Wednesday, April 1, at 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC).

A Russian cosmonaut and his two NASA crewmates undocked from the International Space Station and landed in Kazakhstan early Friday, returning to an unfamiliar world in the grip of a pandemic that will force them to extend the social isolation they were hoping to end.

A commercial Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply ship berthed at the International Space Station fired its main engine for 50 seconds Tuesday in a test of the spacecraft’s ability to reboost, and possibly eventually deorbit, the massive research outpost.