Live coverage: International Space Station crew lands in Kazakhstan

Prognosticators are predicting favorable weather conditions to launch an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday and send NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on its interplanetary journey to interrogate an asteroid and collect a surface sample for return to Earth.

Astronauts will likely perform a previously-unplanned demonstration of the Orion spacecraft’s deep space rendezvous capabilities in a high-altitude orbit around Earth on the crew capsule’s first piloted test flight, now scheduled for 2023. 

A new Russian weather satellite, a CubeSat to test a Silicon Valley startup’s water-based propulsion system, and eight more members of Spire’s commercial fleet of multipurpose nanosatellites were among 33 spacecraft that rode a Soyuz rocket into orbit Friday from Russia’s Far East.