Q&A with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO

A decade in the making, the core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket rolled into the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday to join up with twin solid rocket boosters and an Orion capsule for an unpiloted test flight around the moon.

The Starlink 6-40 mission marked a rare Leap Day launch from the Cape. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket occurred at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Two crewmen returned to Earth from the International Space Station on Friday, riding a Russian Soyuz spaceship to a parachute-assisted, rocket-cushioned landing in Kazakhstan to close out more than 196 days in orbit. Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet undocked from the station at 1047 GMT (6:47 a.m. EDT) and landed in Kazakhstan at 1410 GMT (10:10 a.m. EDT).