VIDEO: Expedition 42-43 mission preview

Check out photos taken by two astronauts who ventured outside the International Space Station on Saturday, running more than 300 feet of wiring that will eventually be connected to new docking ports to receive commercial spaceships built by Boeing and SpaceX.

A three-member space crew returned to Earth just after sunrise Thursday in Kazakhstan, descending through a sun-splashed sky under an orange and white parachute before dipping through fog for a rocket-cushioned touchdown on the snowy steppes of Central Asia.

Inside the final assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft is mated to the core of the Soyuz booster rocket for Sunday’s Expedition 42 launch to the International Space Station.