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

China’s Tiangong 2 space lab, a precursor to the country’s planned space station, is scheduled to fall out of orbit Friday and plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere for a destructive re-entry.

An on-target touchdown in Kazakhstan punctuated a 115-day space mission for Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, Japanese flight engineer Takuya Onishi and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins this weekend. Photographers recorded the moment with these vivid photos.

SpaceX completed Friday the last drop test of the Dragon crew capsule’s parachutes before the first launch of astronauts on the human-rated ship May 27, while technicians at Cape Canaveral have mated the spacecraft’s crew module with its unpressurized trunk section.