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

SpaceX said Sunday that the first Falcon 9 rocket launch from pad 39A, a former shuttle-era complex at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is scheduled to send a Dragon supply ship to the International Space Station in mid-February, deferring a mission with an EchoStar communications satellite that was set to take off this month.

SpaceX is set to resume launches from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral in December with the liftoff of a space station-bound supply ship on top of a Falcon 9 booster, a major step in boosting the company’s flight rate and readying for the debut of the long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket.

Three days after a trio of space station fliers returned to Earth, a Russian cosmonaut, a German flight engineer and a NASA physician-astronaut rocketed into orbit aboard another Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, setting off after the lab complex in the first step of a two-day rendezvous.