Live coverage: International Space Station crew lands in Kazakhstan

Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory ran out of fuel last month.

A Proton rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with the EchoStar 21 communications satellite Thursday, the heaviest commercial payload ever flown aboard a Russian booster.

Four magnetic explosion probes in a towering stack atop an Atlas 5 rocket rode a fountain of flame off the launch pad and into Earth orbit Thursday night for a $1.1 billion NASA science investigation into a universal force of nature.