Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

Outgoing space station commander Shane Kimbrough and two Russian crewmates returned to Earth on Monday, riding a Soyuz capsule in a bubble of hot plasma to a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan. The trio undocked from the space station at 0757 GMT (3:57 a.m. EDT) and landed on the Kazakh steppe at 1120 GMT (7:20 a.m. EDT) Monday.

SpaceX flew 18 payloads to a mid-inclination orbit including an intelligence-gathering satellite for the military of South Korea. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509 UTC).

NASA commentator Dan Huot has everything you need to know about Russia’s Soyuz space capsule and provides a tour inside the cramped spacecraft, which, since the end of the shuttle program, has been the only way to ferry cosmonauts and astronauts to and from the International Space Station.