Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

The mobile service tower is retracted from the Delta 4-Heavy rocket and Orion spacecraft for Exploration Flight Test 1.

SpaceX completed another another launch to add to the company’s Starlink broadband network Thursday. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT) Thursday from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Biden administration supports continuing NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts back to the moon, the White House said last week, without stating whether it will back away from the program’s already-in-doubt schedule for a lunar landing by the end of 2024.