Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

SpaceX launch crews rolled out the company’s next Falcon 9 rocket to pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, then lifted the two-stage launcher vertical for a hold-down engine firing Thursday in preparation for launch next week with a South Korean-owned commercial communications satellite.

NASA announced new delays for the Artemis Moon program at a news conference at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Artemis 2 mission to circle the Moon is now scheduled for 2026 and the first lunar landing is delayed to 2027.

After two of the last three Vega rocket launches ended in failure, Arianespace launched another Vega launcher from French Guiana at 9:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0150 GMT Thursday) with Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 3 commercial Earth observation satellite and five secondary payloads.