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

Clad in pressurized spacesuits, two Russian cosmonauts headed outside the International Space Station on Wednesday and hand-released four tiny CubeSats and installed hardware for a German experiment to track animal migration.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:05 p.m. EDT (0305 GMT) tonight to send Orbital ATK’s commercial Cygnus cargo freighter to the International Space Station. Follow the mission in our live journal.

An EchoStar communications satellite designed to link Europeans with voice and broadband data services rode into orbit on top of a Russian Proton rocket Thursday, deploying into an on-target orbit after nine hours of maneuvers by the launcher’s Breeze M upper stage.