Snapshots: Soyuz takes off

In the week since it departed the International Space Station to wrap up a successful cargo delivery mission, Orbital ATK’s Cygnus supply ship hosted a combustion research experiment, deployed four small satellites for a San Francisco-based startup, then descended into Earth’s atmosphere Sunday for a destructive re-entry.

These photos follow the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft through a final rehearsal, the late stowage of cargo, and finally the lifting of the launcher vertical atop pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Engineers plan to test small modifications to a payload shroud on a European Ariane 5 rocket launch Friday from French Guiana, gathering data on changes introduced to meet stringent criteria for the launch of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope in late 2021.