Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

The twin spacecraft, named Blue and Gold, left Rocket Lab’s Long Beach facilities on Thursday to begin the trip to Florida. The EscaPADE mission will launch aboard Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket.

A Russian Soyuz booster lifted off Friday from Kazakhstan on a complex mission to deploy 73 satellites into three different orbits, including a Russian spacecraft to locate forest fires, 48 CubeSats for Planet’s global Earth observation fleet, and eight nanosatellites for Spire Global’s commercial weather network.

Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov floated outside the International Space Station on Friday and installed an upgraded electronics box on a high-gain communications antenna at the aft end of the Zvezda service module.