Live coverage: Space station crew back on Earth

Powering into a pre-sunrise sky over Florida’s Space Coast on Friday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket provided a memorable show as it climbed into sunlight, delivering a Dragon cargo craft to orbit on a trip to the International Space Station.

Hardware problems that cropped up earlier this month on the Hubble Space Telescope, now approaching the 31st anniversary of its launch, are the latest signs the observatory is showing its age.

Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory ran out of fuel last month.