Video: Progress launches and docks

Bill Gerstenmaier, former director of spaceflight at NASA Headquarters and a widely respected aerospace engineer and manager, has taken a consulting position at SpaceX, the California rocket company NASA helped save in 2008 with the award of a $1.6 billion contract to build and launch space station cargo ships.

Russia’s next Progress cargo freighter rolled out to its launch pad in Kazakhstan on Tuesday in a final move before blasting off Thursday at the tip of a Soyuz rocket to resupply and refuel the International Space Station.

SpaceX brought another Falcon 9 booster into Port Canaveral on Wednesday, a little more than two days after landing the rocket on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean as the company enters an unusually quiescent period of launch activity in Florida — at least by recent standards.