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

A NASA instrument built to help astronomers learn about the structure and behavior of neutron stars, super-dense stellar skeletons left behind by massive explosions, has been mounted to an observation post outside the International Space Station after delivery aboard a SpaceX supply ship earlier this month.

China’s Tiangong 2 space lab, a precursor to the country’s planned space station, is scheduled to fall out of orbit Friday and plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere for a destructive re-entry.

These video replays show the liftoff of the Soyuz rocket carrying Oleg Kononenko, David Saint-Jacques and Anne McClain away from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station around six hours later.