Mission Status Center
Live coverage of the Expedition 42 mission on the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
Live coverage of the Expedition 42 mission on the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
A Soyuz rocket with a three-person crew heading for the International Space Station lifted off at 1357 GMT (9:57 a.m. EDT) Wednesday in the final launch currently scheduled from Gagarin’s Start, a historic site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from where Yuri Gagarin departed on the first human spaceflight in 1961. Beginning next year, Soyuz crews will blast off from a different pad at Baikonur.
NASA and industry teams at Cape Canaveral launched an Orion capsule on a three-minute atmospheric test flight Tuesday to prove the spaceship’s ability to escape from an exploding rocket during launch, demonstrating a key safety feature before astronauts ride the vehicle into deep space. Liftoff occurred at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).
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