Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

Soyuz commander Alexei Ovchinin, flight engineer Oleg Skripochka and outgoing space station skipper Jeff Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday with a parachute-assisted touchdown in Kazakhstan. Their Soyuz TMA-20M capsule undocked from the station at 2151 GMT (5:51 p.m. EDT) and landed at 0113 GMT (9:13 p.m. EDT).

SpaceX simulated an in-flight emergency Sunday to verify the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft has the capability to catapult away from a failing Falcon 9 rocket.

A Vega rocket has blasted off with Europe’s LISA Pathfinder tech demo mission, a probe heading to a station a million miles from Earth to test systems for a future gravitational wave observatory. Liftoff from French Guiana occurred at 0404 GMT Thursday (11:04 p.m. EST Wednesday).