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

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.

A commercial Dragon spaceship soared into orbit from Cape Canaveral on Saturday in pursuit of the International Space Station, but the automated craft’s Falcon 9 booster crash landed after flying back to Earth in a daring test of futuristic reusable rocket technologies.

An Orbital ATK investigation into last year’s Antares rocket crash in Virginia identified a decades-old manufacturing defect inside an AJ26 engine turbopump as the most likely cause of the failure, but a team of NASA engineers was not so sure in their report.