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

SpaceX fired up a Falcon 9 booster at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad Wednesday in advance of a space station resupply launch Dec. 12, returning the pad to service after a rocket explosion there last year.

One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters made its second trip into space Friday, lofting a Bulgarian television broadcasting satellite from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, then landing on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean. Liftoff occurred at 3:10 p.m. EDT (1910 GMT).

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:29 a.m. EDT (1229 GMT) today to place NASA’s new tracking station into the sky. The data router will relay video, telemetry and science information from the space station and dozens of research satellites to a central ground terminal. Follow the ascent in our live journal.