Watch as Progress docks with Space Station bringing a holiday delivery

Four days after a Soyuz ferry craft brought three space station fliers down to a frigid landing in Kazakhstan, three fresh crew members are poised for launch early Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to boost the lab’s crew back to six.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo freighter departed the International Space Station Wednesday after delivering more than 7,800 pounds of equipment and experiments, heading for an extended mission with payloads to study fire behavior in microgravity and test a next-generation radio system.

Two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut boarded their Soyuz MS-06 landing craft for a homecoming Tuesday night, U.S. time, concluding 168 days in orbit. The trio undocked from the International Space Station at 5:08 p.m. EST (2208 GMT), and landed on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan at 9:31 p.m. EST (0231 GMT Wednesday).