Live coverage: Two-man crew departs space station, returns home

Douglas Loverro, a veteran manager with broad experience in national security space operations, has been selected by NASA to lead the agency’s human space flight programs. He takes over at a critical moment as the agency assesses the readiness of new commercial crew ships amid a full-court press to land astronauts on the moon in 2024.

Closing out a five-week mission, a SpaceX Dragon cargo craft departed the International Space Station on Saturday. The spaceship will dive back into Earth’s atmosphere, deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 3:39 p.m. EDT (1939 GMT) about 265 miles west of Baja California.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station used the robotic arm to snare a commercial cargo ship and bring it aboard this morning while traveling at five miles per second.