Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

A Russian cosmonaut and his NASA co-pilot, five months after riding out a dramatic launch abort last October, finally made it into orbit Thursday and, along with a NASA astronaut making her first flight, docked with the International Space Station six hours later to boost the lab’s crew back to six.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbed away from Cape Canaveral early Sunday, and its first stage booster returned to a drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean after sending a heavyweight commercial communications satellite toward orbit for Telesat.

Completing an October to remember, the third Atlas 5 rocket launch in just 29 days thundered into space Saturday, this time to replace an aging satellite in the Global Positioning System.