Live coverage: Ariane 5 launches for DirecTV

Russian technicians rolled a Soyuz rocket from its integration hangar to the launch pad in French Guiana on Tuesday morning, positioning the booster to receive two Galileo navigation satellites ahead of liftoff Friday.

Two crewmen returned to Earth from the International Space Station on Friday, riding a Russian Soyuz spaceship to a parachute-assisted, rocket-cushioned landing in Kazakhstan to close out more than 196 days in orbit. Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet undocked from the station at 1047 GMT (6:47 a.m. EDT) and landed in Kazakhstan at 1410 GMT (10:10 a.m. EDT).

A Russian Proton rocket boosted a Turkish telecommunications satellite into space Friday after a blazing liftoff from Kazakhstan, and a Breeze M upper stage injected the 5.4-ton broadcasting craft into an orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above Earth nine hours later.