Live coverage: Soyuz crew returns to Earth

United Launch Alliance teams began stacking an Atlas 5 rocket inside a vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Monday in preparation for an early February launch with the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint U.S.-European probe that will take the first pictures of the sun’s poles.

A Russian Soyuz rocket rolled to its launch pad in Kazakhstan early Monday aboard a specially-designed rail car, three days before sending a Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut to the International Space Station.

Russia launched an early warning satellite Tuesday, deploying the first in a new fleet of military satellites to detect missile launches heading for Russian territory.