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

Held down by heavy-duty restraints, a Falcon 9 rocket fired up its nine Merlin engines for more than three seconds Thursday evening in a key readiness test before launching with a commercial television broadcast satellite next week.

Flying on its 40th mission, a Japanese H-2A rocket lifted off at 0408 GMT (12:08 a.m. EDT) Monday from the Tanegashima Space Center carrying Japan’s GOSAT 2 satellite to measure greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and the KhalifaSat Earth observation satellite for the United Arab Emirates.

A Russian cosmonaut, his Canadian co-pilot and a NASA flight engineer packed their Soyuz spacecraft for departure from the International Space Station Monday night, targeting a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out an action-packed 204-day mission.