space station

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”.

The orbit of the American space station Skylab is deteriorating; history tells us that parts of it came down in … Western Australia, in 1979.

The pair's mission at the space station had only been expected to last about eight days but after a fault was found on the new Boeing Starliner it returned to Earth empty as a precaution.

But that spacewalk can introduce something novel to the space station - the metallic “space smell”.

Since the mission is not docking with the space station and has limited supplies, weather conditions need to be good for both the launch and splashdown off the Florida coast.