Live coverage: International Space Station crew lands in Kazakhstan

The Falcon 9 booster that launched four astronauts toward orbit last weekend arrived back on Florida’s Space Coast Thursday aboard a SpaceX drone ship, sailing into Port Canaveral with a lean but otherwise in seemingly good shape after it apparently slid across the ship’s deck in high winds and rough seas. Assuming post-flight inspections reveal no major issues, SpaceX aims to reuse the booster to launch the next Crew Dragon mission in 2021.

Mike Suffredini, manager of NASA’s International Space Station program, is stepping down after 10 years overseeing the lab’s final assembly and transition to post-shuttle operations, the agency said Wednesday. Kirk Shireman, deputy director of the Johnson Space Center, will take over as program manager.

Three Chinese astronauts departed the Tiangong space station Saturday and landed in the remote Gobi Desert of northwestern China, capping a six-month expedition that included four spacewalks and a host of experiments in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit.