Live coverage: Vega rocket launches with LISA Pathfinder

A European Ariane 5 rocket took off on its first flight of the year Wednesday with a new-generation communications satellite for Intelsat, lighting up the sky over its French Guiana launch base as it arced over the Atlantic Ocean.

Europe’s fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle departed the International Space Station for the last time Saturday, closing out one of the European Space Agency’s flagship programs as the bus-sized spaceship heads for a destructive re-entry Sunday.

Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander blasted off from Kazakhstan Saturday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, chased down the International Space Station and glided in for a picture-perfect docking.