Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

The third spacecraft to join India’s growing regional navigation system blasted off and flew into orbit aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Wrapping up a busy week on the International Space Station, a crew of three boarded their Soyuz landing craft and headed for Earth on Friday. Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, the most experienced space crewman in history, was at the controls, along with Danish and Kazakh crew members, and landed in Kazakhstan at 8:51 p.m. EDT Friday (0051 GMT Saturday).

After replacing a faulty inertial measurement system blamed for a scrubbed launch attempt Sunday, a Soyuz rocket headed to space from French Guiana today with five satellites, including the next spacecraft for Europe’s multibillion-dollar Earth observing network and a French experiment to probe the validity of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.