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

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle, an unpiloted orbiting military laboratory. Liftoff occurred at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), and the Falcon 9’s first stage booster successfully landed at Cape Canaveral a few minutes later.

Two astronauts floated outside the International Space Station Sunday for the first in a series of spacewalks to upgrade the lab’s aging solar power system, assembling a support fixture that eventually will hold a new solar blanket.

A new satellite joined Russia’s Glonass navigation fleet Saturday with a successful launch on top of a Soyuz rocket into an orbit nearly 12,000 miles above Earth.