Photos: Orion launches at dawn

NASA’s Orion spacecraft achieved all but two of 87 demo objectives on its first orbital flight last month, but details on the capsule’s performance will require dismantling the spaceship’s outer skin in a careful procedure designed to keep most of the Orion prototype intact for future testing.

NASA hopes to have a new leader for the agency’s human spaceflight directorate by the end of the year to replace Bill Gerstenmaier, who held the post for nearly 14 years before his reassignment in July amid the Trump administration’s push to land humans on the moon by 2024, a NASA official said Wednesday.

Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander blasted off from Kazakhstan Saturday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, chased down the International Space Station and glided in for a picture-perfect docking.