Video: Falcon 9 fires up engines for static fire test (members only)

Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday for the first of four spacewalks to repair a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, breezing through work to prep the device for invasive surgery to splice in new coolant pumps and extend the instrument’s life probing the composition of the universe.

Photos released by Russia’s space agency show the launch of a Soyuz booster Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut heading for the International Space Station.

A SpaceX-owned Dragon cargo craft departed the International Space Station at 1011 GMT (6:11 a.m. EDT) Friday, and made a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at 1547 GMT (11:47 a.m. EDT) with more than 3,000 pounds of cargo, research specimens and other hardware.