Live coverage: Two satellites lift off aboard Ariane 5

A three-man space station crew returned to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz capsule, making a parachute-assisted landing on the remote plains of Kazakhstan after 165 days in orbit.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Wednesday carrying NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, the world’s most distant weather satellite heading for a point a million miles from Earth. Launch from Cape Canaveral occurred at 6:03 p.m. EST (2303 GMT).

Two communications payloads — one for Intelsat and another for Europe’s data relay satellite system — lifted off from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket at 1930 GMT (3:30 p.m. EDT) Tuesday.