Live coverage: International crew lands in Kazakhstan

A collection of pad photos from the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket flight to deploy the Orbital ATK Cygnus commercial cargo-delivery spacecraft for the International Space Station.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin floated outside the International Space Station Wednesday, unbolted an experiment airlock from the Rassvet docking compartment and then connected it to Russia’s Nauka multi-purpose laboratory module in a 7-hour, 11-minute excursion.

A Japanese H-2A rocket launched from Tanegashima Island on Wednesday with the Himawari 9 weather observatory bound for a perch more than 22,000 miles above Earth to improve forecasting in the Asia-Pacific. Liftoff of the 17-story rocket from southern Japan occurred at 0620 GMT (2:20 a.m. EDT) Wednesday.