Live coverage: Fresh crew docks at space station

A four-man crew led by a former NASA astronaut intends to blast off early next year aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for a flight to the International Space Station, the first such purely commercial, non-government flight to orbit in space history, officials said Tuesday.

Pushing out a brilliant plume of nearly 5,000-degree exhaust, a test booster for NASA’s Space Launch System fired for more than two minutes Tuesday to verify the upgraded space shuttle-era solid rocket motor is ready to help send astronauts into deep space.

Two astronauts floated outside the International Space Station Sunday for the first in a series of spacewalks to upgrade the lab’s aging solar power system, assembling a support fixture that eventually will hold a new solar blanket.