Live coverage: Two satellites lift off aboard Ariane 5

Riding on a mobile launch platform, an Ariane 5 rocket made the 1.7-mile trip from its final assembly building to the ELA-3 launch zone in Kourou, French Guiana, on Monday morning, one day before its blastoff on a commercial mission with Australian and Indian communications satellites.

Russian commander Anton Shkaplerov, NASA flight engineer Scott Tingle and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai docked with the International Space Station Tuesday at 3:39 a.m. EST (0839 GMT), two days after blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Veteran Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, flanked by Japanese flight engineer Kimiya Yui and NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, boarded a Soyuz landing craft Friday and made a parachute-assisted touchdown in Kazakhstan at 1312 GMT (8:12 a.m. EST) to close out more than 141 days on the International Space Station.