Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

After tropical weather passes through Florida to start the week, meteorologists say there is a 40 percent chance of acceptable conditions for the United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket to fly Thursday from Cape Canaveral with a reconnaissance satellite payload for the U.S. government.

Rolling toward a mid-May deployment of a clandestine spy satellite, United Launch Alliance’s triple-body Delta 4-Heavy rocket moved from its Cape Canaveral assembly building to pad 37B yesterday.

After replacing a faulty inertial measurement system blamed for a scrubbed launch attempt Sunday, a Soyuz rocket headed to space from French Guiana today with five satellites, including the next spacecraft for Europe’s multibillion-dollar Earth observing network and a French experiment to probe the validity of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.