Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

SpaceX is preparing for the next launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, set for blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the EchoStar 23 television broadcast satellite destined to cover Brazil. The rocket’s static fire test, a major milestone in any SpaceX launch campaign, was performed Thursday.

A three-man space station crew returned to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz capsule, making a parachute-assisted landing on the remote plains of Kazakhstan after 165 days in orbit.

While one of its two science instruments remains sidelined, NASA’s InSight probe has proven Mars is seismically active through the detection of hundreds of quakes, some of which can be traced to a volcanic region nearly 1,000 miles away.