Video: Time lapse of ATV’s final departure from ISS

The commercial SpaceX Dragon cargo-delivery craft with the experimental BEAM module — the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module — arrives at the International Space Station two days after launching from Cape Canaveral.

A SpaceX-owned Dragon cargo craft left the International Space Station on Friday and flew back to Earth for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean with a dozen mice and more than 3,000 pounds of experiment specimens and space hardware.

The pace of the European Space Agency’s development of a power and propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew capsule will likely determine when an unpiloted test flight of the spaceship and its heavy-lift rocket will take off, NASA officials said last week.