Gallery: Antares rocket explodes

No one had ever lost 26 satellites at once until a launch failure bit Planet Labs last year, temporarily setting back the San Francisco startup’s ambition to map the globe every day.

A commercial Cygnus supply ship left the International Space Station on Monday after delivering more than 5,000 pounds of cargo and experiments, ready to start a week of standalone operations to include a groundbreaking microgravity fire experiment and deployment of four commercial weather-monitoring CubeSats in orbit.

The two structural elements of Orbital ATK’s OA-7 Cygnus space freighter were delivered to Kennedy Space Center for final assembly, the packing of cargo and launch to the International Space Station.