Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander geared up for launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Saturday on a six-hour flight to the International Space Station.

This was the first time that the space agency happened to launch a crewed mission to the International Space Station on a Friday the 13th. The Crew-12 mission took flight onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:15 a.m. EST (1015 UTC).

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.