Live coverage: Russian-American-British crew launches toward space station

Europe’s Sentinel 5P satellite, fitted with a Dutch-developed spectrometer to measure gases in Earth’s atmosphere, was fueled and mated to its Russian Rockot booster over the last month at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a military complex around 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow.

Fresh off a series of three complex spacewalks to repair a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, the International Space Station’s crew is set to receive two robotic resupply freighters in the next week after launches from Florida’s Space Coast and the steppes of Kazakhstan.

A Falcon 9 rocket took off for its fourth flight of the year Friday with a middle-of-the-night mission for SKY Perfect JSAT, a Tokyo-based satellite operator. The JCSAT 14 communications satellite launched from Cape Canaveral at 1:21 a.m. EDT (0521 GMT), and the rocket’s first stage booster made a successful landing at sea a few minutes later.