Live coverage: Veteran three-man crew docks with space station

The European Space Agency’s $1.6 billion Rosetta spacecraft closed in Thursday for a deliberate crash landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early Friday, a slow-motion kamikaze plunge to bring the enormously successful mission to an end after more than two years of unprecedented close-range observations.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, designed to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, fired into orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Watch as Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague launch aboard a Soyuz rocket bound for the International Space Station but a Soyuz booster failure cut short their ascent into orbit.