Live coverage: Soyuz sends Russian and two Americans to space station

SpaceX will launch a space station-bound cargo ship with nearly 2.5 tons of supplies and experiments next Friday, Dec. 8, with a previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket booster after winning NASA approval for the reuse plan, agency officials said Wednesday.

A malfunction during a drop test over Nevada last month for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon program has engineers re-examining the crew capsule’s parachutes, and Boeing has also encountered parachute failures during testing for its commercial crew capsule, a senior NASA official confirmed Wednesday.

A small spacecraft built for the Russian military lifted off Thursday on top of a modified Soyuz booster, beginning a mission to reportedly test a compact Earth-imaging platform that could be used on future spy satellites.