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

The next flight of China’s heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket will debut a new configuration designed to launch modules for a Chinese space station. But a demonstration launch of the Long March 5B booster scheduled as soon as April will instead carry a prototype of China’s next-generation deep space crew capsule into orbit on an unpiloted test flight.

Khrunichev and International Launch Services, the team behind Russia’s Proton rocket, are developing two scaled-down versions of the booster in a bid to capture a wider share of the commercial launch market, the companies announced last week.

The European Space Agency’s Aeolus winds observatory is set for liftoff aboard a Vega rocket to kick off a three-year mission to measure global wind profiles from an orbit nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) above Earth.