Video: Orion flight highlights

The three U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station said Monday they’re ready to sign up for a trip to the moon if NASA can meet the Trump administration’s newly stated goal of returning Americans to the lunar surface within the next five years.

A NASA spacecraft that will fly closer to the sun than any mission before will launch on a Delta 4-Heavy rocket in 2018, requiring a boost from the largest active launcher in the U.S. inventory and repeated flybys around Venus to reach an operating post inside the solar atmosphere.

Launch teams are readying three rockets for a series of blastoffs this week from Cape Canaveral to loft a classified orbiting spy platform for the U.S. government, a long-delayed Argentine radar imaging payload, and the next set of Starlink broadband satellites.