Live coverage: Falcon 9 soars into space with DSCOVR

Dragon Freedom undocked from the space station at 1:05 a.m. EDT (1705 UTC) on Tuesday to begin its roughly 17-hour trip to splash down along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The parachute-supported splash down happened at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 UTC).

A SpaceX-owned Dragon cargo craft left the International Space Station on Friday and flew back to Earth for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean with a dozen mice and more than 3,000 pounds of experiment specimens and space hardware.

Flying with an exceptionally lightweight payload, a Falcon 9 rocket delivered a multipurpose research satellite into a nearly 450-mile-high orbit Thursday for Taiwan following a smooth countdown and liftoff from California’s Central Coast.