Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

The mobile service tower is retracted from the Delta 4-Heavy rocket and Orion spacecraft for Exploration Flight Test 1.

A Soyuz rocket with a three-person crew heading for the International Space Station lifted off at 1357 GMT (9:57 a.m. EDT) Wednesday in the final launch currently scheduled from Gagarin’s Start, a historic site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from where Yuri Gagarin departed on the first human spaceflight in 1961. Beginning next year, Soyuz crews will blast off from a different pad at Baikonur.

SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship wrapped up a 29-day stay at the International Space Station on Tuesday, departing the complex with with nearly 3,700 pounds of research specimens and return cargo before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.