Live coverage: Soyuz MS-14 docks at space station

Pettit will fly to the orbiting outpost alongside Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner on the Soyuz MS-26 mission. Liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome is set for 12:23 p.m. EDT (1623 UTC).

A European-built communications satellite, manufactured in secret for the Egyptian government, joined a European Space Agency exoplanet observatory aboard a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 cargo plane for a trans-Atlantic flight Wednesday to begin final launch preparations in French Guiana.

Ground crews at the Guiana Space Center in South America have spent the last few months preparing the BepiColombo spacecraft, a tandem mission with European and Japanese science orbiters bound for Mercury, for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.