Video: Soyuz MS-01 leaves the space station for landing

A U.S. Army veteran of Operation Desert Storm, a Russian Air Force MiG-29 fighter pilot, and a former flight controller for Russia’s Mir space station arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, with a smooth docking aboard a Soyuz spaceship at 0952 GMT (5:52 a.m. EDT), two days after a successful launch from Kazakhstan.

A Soyuz rocket lifted off Sunday from Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East with 36 internet satellites built on Florida’s Space Coast for OneWeb, bringing the company’s fleet to 182 spacecraft, more than a quarter of the way to building out a constellation of nearly 650 orbiting relay nodes. 

A Russian Soyuz booster blasted off from a snow-covered launch pad in Kazakhstan on Wednesday with nearly 6,000 pounds of fuel, water and supplies for the International Space Station.