Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station to begin a one-month stay at the orbiting outpost. Dragon launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 9:29 p.m. EST (0229 UTC) for the Commercial Resupply Services 31 (CRS-31) mission.

The Biden administration supports continuing NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts back to the moon, the White House said last week, without stating whether it will back away from the program’s already-in-doubt schedule for a lunar landing by the end of 2024.

Clad in pressurized spacesuits, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev used knives and scissors to slice through insulation and a debris shield on a Soyuz spaceship set to return to Earth next week, finally reaching the capsule’s metallic hull to examine the site of an air leak plugged in August.