Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

Riding the rails to the launch pad Wednesday morning, the Atlas 5 rocket was rolled out to Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 for liftoff Thursday night to deploy four NASA satellites that will probe Earth’s magnetosphere for a high-priority research project.

China is scheduled to launch a human-rated spacecraft the size of a bus Thursday, paving the way for a month-long visit by two astronauts in October and nudging the country’s space program closer to building a large research complex in orbit by the early 2020s.

Four astronauts strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to a fiery pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday, closing out the first operational flight of SpaceX’s futuristic touch-screen ferry ship.