Watch the Falcon 9 launch and 1st stage landing from every angle

A Russian Soyuz booster climbed into orbit Monday with a U.S. Army colonel, a veteran Russian cosmonaut and a Canadian flight engineer, kicking off a six-hour chase of the International Space Station.

Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket will deliver the commercial Cygnus supply ship to an orbit with an altitude between 130 miles and 179 miles within about nine minutes of liftoff from Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.