Live coverage: Russian-American-British crew launches toward space station

More photos show the successful liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket flight carrying the Cygnus commercial cargo spacecraft for Orbital ATK and the International Space Station.

A Soyuz spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station on Thursday to bring home NASA flight engineer Jessica Meir, astronaut Andrew Morgan and Russian commander Oleg Skripochka. The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft departed the station at 9:53 p.m. Thursday (0153 GMT Friday) and landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 1:16 a.m. EDT (0516 GMT).

The first launch from the nearly $3 billion Vostochny Cosmodrome took off Thursday, carrying three satellites into orbit from the new spaceport nestled in Russia’s forested Far East.