Live coverage: Vega rocket launches with LISA Pathfinder

A Soyuz rocket with a three-person crew heading for the International Space Station lifted off at 1357 GMT (9:57 a.m. EDT) Wednesday in the final launch currently scheduled from Gagarin’s Start, a historic site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from where Yuri Gagarin departed on the first human spaceflight in 1961. Beginning next year, Soyuz crews will blast off from a different pad at Baikonur.

Officials expect to delay next year’s launch of a European Mars orbiter and lander about two months — from January to March — to remove faulty pressure transducers from the landing craft’s braking system, the European Space Agency announced Friday.

A European Ariane 5 rocket, burning a cryogenic mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, thundered into the sky over French Guiana at dusk Tuesday with two communications relay satellites to serve the Arab world and India.