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

A Soyuz rocket is standing on the launch pad in Kazakhstan used on Yuri Gagarin’s historic first human spaceflight in 1961, ready to send three people toward the International Space Station.

The maiden flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, a heavy-lift human-rated rocket and one of the agency’s core programs, will likely not be ready for takeoff until 2020, officials said recently.

SpaceX launched its first mission of the year Monday at 9:19 p.m. EST (0219 GMT Tuesday), when a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral with SpaceX’s third batch of 60 Starlink broadband satellites.