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

Fresh off a series of three complex spacewalks to repair a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, the International Space Station’s crew is set to receive two robotic resupply freighters in the next week after launches from Florida’s Space Coast and the steppes of Kazakhstan.

NASA fired up four hydrogen-fueled main engines on the core stage of the first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket Thursday in on a test stand in Mississippi, a redo of a crucial hot fire test that was cut short in January by technical issues. The engines burned more than eight minutes in an apparently successful test.

A day after a rare last-minute abort by its Soyuz launcher, a sharp-eyed civilian-operated Russian Earth observation satellite blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sunday on a five-year mission, giving Russia a fleet of three advanced digital imaging spacecraft in orbit.