Live coverage: Space station crew back on Earth

Blue Origin launched its New Shepard suborbital rocket to the edge of space Tuesday from the company’s remote desert test site in West Texas on an experimental flight to test precision lunar landing technology for NASA.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft raced past a frozen remnant of the solar system’s birth early New Year’s Day, phoned home to confirm a successful flyby and readied a treasure trove of pictures and other data for transmission back to eager scientists some 4.1 billion miles away.

Russia launched a fresh satellite for the Glonass network Wednesday aboard a Soyuz rocket, replenishing a fleet of positioning and timing stations used around the world for navigation services.