Live coverage: Proton rocket blasts off with Astra 2G

Outgoing space station commander Randy Bresnik, joined by Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy and European Space Agency flight engineer Paolo Nespoli, returned to Earth early Thursday after nearly five months in orbit. Their Soyuz MS-05 capsule undocked from the International Space Station at 12:14 a.m. EST (0514 GMT), and landed on the steppe of Kazakhstan at 3:37 a.m. EST (0837 GMT).

SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral raised a Falcon 9 rocket vertical at the Complex 40 launch pad and performed a static fire test Friday. The Falcon 9 will be used to launch a commercial geostationary communications satellite no earlier than Monday at 7:10 p.m. EST (0010 GMT Tuesday).

A commercial satellite launched Sunday on a Russian Proton rocket successfully deployed in orbit thousands of miles above Earth to join Inmarsat’s new communications network providing high-speed data links between airplanes, ships and far-flung customers anywhere in the world.