Live coverage of the countdown and flight of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Orion space capsule on its first test flight in Earth orbit. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
Falcon 9
Live coverage: Falcon 9 roars into orbit with Japanese satellite
A Falcon 9 rocket took off for its fourth flight of the year Friday with a middle-of-the-night mission for SKY Perfect JSAT, a Tokyo-based satellite operator. The JCSAT 14 communications satellite launched from Cape Canaveral at 1:21 a.m. EDT (0521 GMT), and the rocket’s first stage booster made a successful landing at sea a few minutes later.
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NASA unveils renamed solar probe
A NASA spacecraft being readied for launch in 2018 will make repeated trips through the sun’s outer atmosphere, passing within 4 million miles of the star’s blazing surface at more than 430,000 mph to shed light on what powers the sun’s high-temperature corona, the origins of the solar wind and the causes of potentially catastrophic solar storms.