Live coverage: Soyuz crew capsule departs station, lands in Kazakhstan

A Russian Soyuz-2.1a rocket rolled out to a launch pad Monday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, ready for the first crewed flight to use the modernized Soyuz booster configuration. Liftoff with two Russian cosmonauts and a veteran NASA astronaut is scheduled Thursday on an expedition to the International Space Station.

Strapped into a new SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule making its maiden flight, Whitson, test pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India, European Space Agency astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland, and Hungarian engineer Tibor Kapu roared away from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:31 a.m. EDT.

A Falcon 9 rocket fired into a late-night sky Friday night over Cape Canaveral with a Dragon supply ship bound for the International Space Station. Eight minutes later, the booster returned to Florida’s Space Coast for SpaceX’s 50th landing of a Falcon first stage.