Live coverage: Proton soars into space with Inmarsat satellite

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Terry Virts suited up and ventured outside the International Space Station on Sunday on their third spacewalk in eight days to install equipment to help future commercial crew capsules built by Boeing and SpaceX navigate to the complex.

After two of the last three Vega rocket launches ended in failure, Arianespace launched another Vega launcher from French Guiana at 9:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0150 GMT Thursday) with Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 3 commercial Earth observation satellite and five secondary payloads.

SpaceX is gearing up for launch of an unpiloted Crew Dragon spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center for a crucial test of the crew capsule’s launch abort system. A modified Falcon 9 rocket performed a test-firing at launch pad 39A Saturday before carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft into the upper atmosphere for an in-flight abort test scheduled for Jan. 18.