Live coverage: 400th Proton rocket takes off with Russian satellite

An Ariane 5 rocket lifted off Thursday at 2345 GMT (7:45 p.m. EDT), flying from a French Guiana launch pad to geostationary transfer orbit with the ViaSat 2 and Eutelsat 172B communications satellites.

Two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut boarded their Soyuz MS-06 landing craft for a homecoming Tuesday night, U.S. time, concluding 168 days in orbit. The trio undocked from the International Space Station at 5:08 p.m. EST (2208 GMT), and landed on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan at 9:31 p.m. EST (0231 GMT Wednesday).

SpaceX called off a planned launch attempt Saturday to deploy the next batch of satellites for the Starlink broadband network. Two commercial Earth-observing satellites for BlackSky are also awaiting a ride into orbit on the Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.