Live coverage: Soyuz test flight concludes with landing in Kazakhstan

SpaceX launched the first of the company’s upgraded generation of Falcon 9 launchers, known as Block 5, from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT). The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off with Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, and SpaceX recovered the rocket’s first stage on a vessel in the Atlantic Ocean.

Nine Merlin engines ignited and throttled up to nearly 2 million pounds of thrust Sunday during a brief hold-down firing of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, sending a plume of smoke out of the flame trench at Kennedy Space Center’s historic launch pad 39A as the company preps for a space station cargo mission next weekend.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague will take the place of Anne McClain on a spacewalk Friday outside the International Space Station, teaming up with crewmate Christina Koch  to continue a series of battery upgrades on an excursion that would have been the first all-female spacewalk in history.