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

A Russian cosmonaut, his Canadian co-pilot and a NASA flight engineer boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth Monday evening, landing on the balmy steppe of Kazakhstan to close out an action-packed 204-day mission.

SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon spacecraft, fixed to the forward end of a Falcon 9 rocket, emerged Thursday from the company’s hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the quarter-mile journey to its launch mount at pad 39A, where liftoff is scheduled early Saturday on a critical test flight before astronauts strap into the ship later this year.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague will take the place of Anne McClain on a spacewalk Friday outside the International Space Station, teaming up with crewmate Christina Koch  to continue a series of battery upgrades on an excursion that would have been the first all-female spacewalk in history.