Live coverage: 400th Proton rocket takes off with Russian satellite

Running nearly a month late because of work to repair a damaged cable, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was primed for launch early Wednesday to carry two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut to the International Space Station, boosting the lab’s crew back to six.

Russian commander Sergey Ryzhikov, flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins climbed into their Soyuz landing craft and undocked from the International Space Station at 9:34 p.m. EDT Friday (0134 GMT Saturday). The trio touched down on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan at 12:56 a.m. EDT (0456 GMT) to wrap up six months in orbit.

A commercial broadcast satellite will blast off from Kazakhstan on Saturday aboard a Proton rocket to transmit television, multimedia and broadband services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.