Watch the Falcon 9 launch from pad 39A

Russian commander Sergey Prokopyev, German flight engineer Alexander Gerst, and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor closed out a nearly 197-day space mission with a landing in Kazakhstan aboard their Soyuz MS-09 crew carry ship at 0502 GMT (12:02 a.m. EST) Thursday. The Soyuz crew undocked from the International Space Station at 0140 GMT (8:40 p.m. EST Wednesday) to begin their return to Earth.

A Christmas Eve reading from the book of Genesis by the Apollo 8 astronauts — commander Frank Borman, lunar module pilot Bill Anders and command module pilot Jim Lovell — from lunar orbit in 1968.

Veteran Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko, outgoing space station skipper Tim Kopra and British astronaut Tim Peake departed the International Space Station early Saturday aboard the Soyuz TMA-19M capsule and landed in Kazakhstan at 0915 GMT (5:15 a.m. EDT).