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

In a rapid-fire crew rotation, a Russian cosmonaut, a NASA astronaut and an Italian flier plan to close out a 139-day mission aboard the International Space Station with a fiery plunge back to the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan aboard their Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft early Thursday.

Expanding a single instant in time to 30 minutes, the upcoming Atlas 5 rockets with Cygnus cargo-delivery freighters bound for the International Space Station will have an unprecedented opportunity available to launch each day.

SpaceX’s first launch since August took off from Cape Canaveral at 9:56 a.m. EST (1456 GMT) to carry 60 broadband satellites into orbit for the company’s Starlink network. The Starlink satellites rode together on top of a Falcon 9 rocket with a previously-flown first stage and a reused payload fairing.