Live coverage: International crew lands in Kazakhstan

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.

Closing out a five-week mission, a SpaceX Dragon cargo craft departed the International Space Station on Saturday. The spaceship will dive back into Earth’s atmosphere, deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 3:39 p.m. EDT (1939 GMT) about 265 miles west of Baja California.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 10:30 p.m. EDT Thursday (0230 GMT Friday). The 229-foot-tall launch vehicle delivered 60 satellites to orbit to begin the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink Internet network, a fleet of spacecraft that may eventually number thousands.