Live coverage: Proton rocket blasts off on lengthy 15-hour mission

Two days after a dramatic docking abort, an unpiloted Russian Soyuz spacecraft glided in for a picture-perfect link up with the International Space Station late Monday, using a different port the second time around and in the process confirming the problem Saturday was with faulty rendezvous equipment in the original docking port.

Russia’s Proton rocket took off on its first launch of the year Sunday with a commercial satellite to expand Inmarsat’s next-generation mobile communications network. Liftoff occurred at 1231 GMT (7:31 a.m. EST), and it took more than 15 hours to place the Inmarsat spacecraft in the correct orbit.

A Chinese communications satellite heading for geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator lifted off Thursday from the Xichang space base in southwestern China aboard a Long March 3B rocket on the first space launch of 2019.