Live coverage: Space station crew safely returns to Earth

A troublesome liquid oxygen valve on the Space Launch System’s first flight-rated core stage will keep NASA from performing a second test-firing of the rocket’s four main engines this week.

Peggy Whitson, America’s most experienced astronaut with nearly two years in orbit over three missions, returns to Earth Saturday after an extended 288-day stay aboard the International Space Station, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan with Soyuz MS-04 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA flight engineer Jack Fischer.

With lingering uncertainty about when new U.S. commercial vehicles can regularly carry crews to the space station, NASA said Tuesday it will pay the Russian space agency more than $90 million for a round-trip ticket to the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft later this year.