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

A three-minute test flight Tuesday morning over Cape Canaveral will help ensure NASA’s Orion crew capsule — the vehicle being built to carry astronauts back to the moon — can safely escape from a catastrophic failure on launch.

A Soyuz rocket climbed away from a historic launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday with three new crew members heading for the International Space Station.

A Russian rocket released two Galileo navigation satellites nearly 15,000 miles above Earth early Friday, adding to a growing fleet giving Europe an independent space-based positioning system tracking automobiles, airplanes and cell phone-carrying people around the world.