Live coverage: International crew lands in Kazakhstan

With a robot rather than a cosmonaut in the commander’s seat, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft rocketed into orbit from Kazakhstan late Wednesday (U.S. time) en route to the International Space Station on a critical test flight before crews begin riding an upgraded Soyuz booster next year.

SpaceX launched its fifth Falcon 9 rocket in 22 days on Saturday, beginning a mission to deploy 52 more Starlink internet satellites and two rideshare payloads for Capella Space and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. Liftoff from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurred at 6:56 p.m. EDT (2256 GMT), and SpaceX successfully landed the first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

China is scheduled to launch a human-rated spacecraft the size of a bus Thursday, paving the way for a month-long visit by two astronauts in October and nudging the country’s space program closer to building a large research complex in orbit by the early 2020s.