Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

Three days after a trio of space station fliers returned to Earth, a Russian cosmonaut, a German flight engineer and a NASA physician-astronaut rocketed into orbit aboard another Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, setting off after the lab complex in the first step of a two-day rendezvous.

NASA has selected SpaceX to build a spacecraft to land the first astronauts on the moon since 1972, choosing Elon Musk’s space company over competing proposals from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and the aerospace firm Dynetics, officials announced Friday.

A Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off from South America at 0848 GMT (4:48 a.m. EDT) Tuesday with two new navigation satellites for Europe’s Galileo system, readying the network for initial operating capability later this year.