Live coverage: Soyuz crew returns to Earth

Launching the high-tech GOES-R satellite to revolutionize U.S. weather forecasting, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket thunders away from Cape Canaveral on Saturday at 6:42 p.m. EST (2342 GMT).

A Japanese Epsilon rocket launched Tuesday from the Uchinoura Space Center, a shoreline spaceport on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, with a space weather research probe to study phenomena inside the turbulent Van Allen radiation belts. Liftoff of the 85-foot-tall rocket occurred at 1100 GMT (6 a.m. EST).

One week after two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut arrived at the International Space Station, the three crew members they’re replacing strapped into their own Soyuz spacecraft, undocked and returned to Earth Wednesday with a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 196-day mission.