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

A geodetic surveying satellite for the Russian military successfully launched Friday aboard a Rockot booster — a modified ballistic missile — from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

A late-night liftoff Thursday lit up the forested shoreline of South America as a Russian-made Soyuz rocket streaked into orbit with two new satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation system. Relive the launch with a video replay and photos of the fiery departure.

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.