Live coverage: H-2A rocket blasts off with navigation satellite

Completing an October to remember, the third Atlas 5 rocket launch in just 29 days thundered into space Saturday, this time to replace an aging satellite in the Global Positioning System.

Veteran Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, flanked by Japanese flight engineer Kimiya Yui and NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, boarded a Soyuz landing craft Friday and made a parachute-assisted touchdown in Kazakhstan at 1312 GMT (8:12 a.m. EST) to close out more than 141 days on the International Space Station.

Two days after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, three new crew members arrived Friday at the International Space Station to begin a six-month stay. Docking of the crew’s Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft to the station’s Rassvet module occurred at 9:01 a.m. EDT (1301 GMT).