Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

A Rockot booster and Breeze upper stage delivered three Russian military communications satellites to orbit Friday after a launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome around 500 miles north of Moscow.

A Russian cosmonaut and his NASA co-pilot, five months after riding out a dramatic launch abort last October, finally made it into orbit Thursday and, along with a NASA astronaut making her first flight, docked with the International Space Station six hours later to boost the lab’s crew back to six.

NASA and U.S. military officials are reviewing a malfunction that triggered a premature engine shutdown during a flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket earlier this month, a cautionary step before upcoming launches with a GPS navigation satellite and astronauts on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.