Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

SpaceX’s next Crew Dragon capsule was delivered to Cape Canaveral this week from a California factory for a liftoff as soon as this spring with veteran NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a test flight to the International Space Station, officials announced Friday.

Two U.S.-German satellites launched more than 15 years ago to measure Earth’s changing gravity field will stop collecting data in November, a few months before a pair of replacement craft will launch to resume gravity measurements, NASA officials said.

The heart of NASA’s first flight-ready Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket emerged from its factory in New Orleans Wednesday morning for a barge trip to the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for an eight-minute test-firing of its space shuttle-era hydrogen-fueled engines.