Live coverage: Atlas 5 countdown and launch journal

For the fourth time this month, SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast with another 60 Starlink internet satellites. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 4:28 a.m. EDT (0828 GMT) Wednesday. The Falcon 9’s booster landed on an offshore drone ship.

In a rapid-fire crew rotation, a Russian cosmonaut, a NASA astronaut and an Italian flier plan to close out a 139-day mission aboard the International Space Station with a fiery plunge back to the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan aboard their Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft early Thursday.

NASA’s InSight lander has placed a protective enclosure over a French-developed seismometer designed to detect tremors on Mars, completing the deployment of the first of two science instruments delivered to the Red Planet in November.