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

A Soyuz rocket lifted off Friday from a jungle spaceport in South America with two satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation network. The four-hour launch sequence began with blastoff at 2146 GMT (5:46 p.m. EDT).

NASA’s senior manager in charge of the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, Eric Smith, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the decision to reschedule its launch from October 2018 to the spring of 2019.

Failure struck Russia’s troubled space program for the second time in three weeks Saturday, when a Proton rocket carrying a high-tech satellite for Mexico’s new $1.6 billion space-based communications network crashed shortly after liftoff.