Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

Completing a 2,700-mile journey across the United States, America’s inaugural Orion spaceship arrived back home at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, just under two weeks after its trial by fire.

A Boeing-built communications satellite lifted off at 7:21 p.m. EDT (2321 GMT) Monday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft will add to Inmarsat’s Global Xpress network linking airplanes, ships and other mobile terminals with broadband Internet and data services.

A recovery team stationed in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California secured NASA’s Orion spacecraft and winched it into the flooded well deck of a U.S. Navy transport ship after the capsule splashed down into the sea to wrap up a successful four-and-a-half hour test flight.