Live coverage: SpaceX supply ship returns to Earth

After years of delays, the core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System moon rocket rolled out of its New Orleans factory Wednesday, heading for a NASA site in Mississippi for a test-firing before engineers hope to ship the rocket to its Florida launch base by this fall.

A Russian Soyuz booster arrived at its launch pad on the Kazakh steppe Sunday, the last stop before liftoff Wednesday with a three-person crew bound for the International Space Station.

SpaceX’s tenth launch of the year took off Tuesday from California’s Central Coast on a unique ridehsare mission to add satellites to Iridium’s communications network and replace two Earth science satellites which ended their observations last year.