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

SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket launch, using a previously-flown first stage booster, took a step closer to liftoff Thursday with a countdown rehearsal culminating in ignition of the launcher’s nine Merlin main engines in a hold-down firing at pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A Russian Soyuz booster arrived at its launch pad Sunday in Kazakhstan for two days of final countdown preparations ahead of liftoff with a Russian cosmonaut and two U.S. astronauts Tuesday on the way to the International Space Station.

The four RS-25 engines at the bottom of NASA’s first Space Launch System core stage shut down about a minute into a ground test-firing Saturday that was supposed to last more than eight minutes.