Live coverage: Space station crew safely returns to Earth

Boeing engineers have completed hotfire testing on a flight-like model of the Starliner crew capsule, clearing a major hurdle before a pad abort test and a demonstration flight to the International Space Station later this summer, Boeing announced Friday.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, contained inside its aeroshell for a searing plunge into the Martian atmosphere next year, has been cocooned inside the payload shroud of its Atlas 5 launcher and mated with the rocket ahead of liftoff from Cape Canaveral scheduled for July 30.

The International Space Station’s robotic arm, under the control of engineers on Earth, extracted an experimental inflatable habitat from the trunk of SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship Saturday and attached it to the orbiting complex.