Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

Prognosticators are predicting favorable weather conditions to launch an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday and send NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on its interplanetary journey to interrogate an asteroid and collect a surface sample for return to Earth.

A heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket hurled a 9-ton Chinese spacecraft toward the moon Monday on a 23-day mission attempting to return lunar samples to Earth for the first time in 44 years.

Japan’s third navigation satellite rode an H-2A rocket into orbit Saturday from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, one week after officials aborted a countdown to resolve a helium leak in the vehicle’s first stage. Liftoff occurred at 0529 GMT (1:29 a.m. EDT) Saturday.