Live coverage: Falcon 9 disintegrates after launch

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the Galaxy 37 communications satellite for Intelsat in the early hours of Thursday. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 1 a.m. EDT (0500 UTC).

Russian commander Sergey Prokopyev, German flight engineer Alexander Gerst, and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor closed out a nearly 197-day space mission with a landing in Kazakhstan aboard their Soyuz MS-09 crew carry ship at 0502 GMT (12:02 a.m. EST) Thursday. The Soyuz crew undocked from the International Space Station at 0140 GMT (8:40 p.m. EST Wednesday) to begin their return to Earth.

The mission also broke SpaceX’s record number of orbital launches achieved in 2023. Liftoff happened at 2:10 a.m. EDT (0610 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.