Soyuz crew heads for home as SpaceX gears up for Crew Dragon flight to space station

Two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut undocked from the International Space Station late Friday and braced for a fiery plunge back to landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan, amid preparations in Florida for launch of another station-bound crew Thursday aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

While Russian recovery forces deployed in Kazakhstan on Friday for the Soyuz landing, SpaceX engineers hauled a Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule to the Kennedy Space Center launch pad a few hours before the ship's three-man one-woman crew flew in to make final preparations for launch. "It is awesome being at Kennedy Space Center, especially on launch week," Crew-2 commander Shane Kimbrough told reporters at the runway. "It's definitely getting real. Our crew is extremely well trained (and) we are really excited and ready to go."