Video: Delta 4-Heavy tower rollback

NASA’s Orion spacecraft took a road trip to the launch pad Tuesday night, arriving at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 37 where a Delta 4-Heavy rocket awaits flight of the new capsule on Dec. 4.

Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander blasted off from Kazakhstan Saturday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, chased down the International Space Station and glided in for a picture-perfect docking.

NASA and industry teams at Cape Canaveral launched an Orion capsule on a three-minute atmospheric test flight Tuesday to prove the spaceship’s ability to escape from an exploding rocket during launch, demonstrating a key safety feature before astronauts ride the vehicle into deep space. Liftoff occurred at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).