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

A NASA astronaut and two cosmonaut crewmates strapped into their Soyuz ferry ship Monday evening, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to an on-target landing on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan early Tuesday to wrap up an eight-month mission.

Russian technicians rolled a Soyuz rocket from its integration hangar to the launch pad in French Guiana on Tuesday morning, positioning the booster to receive two Galileo navigation satellites ahead of liftoff Friday.

Presenting the results of an inquiry into a European Vega rocket failure last month, officials said Friday that misleading instructions and inadequate preflight checks caused teams to overlook wrongly-installed cables on the launcher’s upper stage steering system. Arianespace aims to resume Vega launches before the end of March.