Live coverage: 400th Proton rocket takes off with Russian satellite

SpaceX’s first launch of 2018 blasted off at 8 p.m. EST Sunday (0100 GMT Monday). A Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral with a mysterious U.S. government payload known as Zuma, and the first stage returned to landing on Florida’s Space Coast around eight minutes later.

The first 34 satellites manufactured on a new commercial spacecraft assembly line just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are scheduled for liftoff on a Soyuz rocket Thursday halfway around the world in Kazakhstan, kicking off a sequence of up to 20 launches from three countries to deploy nearly 650 satellites for OneWeb’s global Internet network.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Central Coast at 10:42:18 a.m. PST (1:42:18 p.m. EST; 1842:18 GMT) Sunday with the Jason 3 oceanography satellite. A secondary objective of the mission to recover the first stage on a barge in the Pacific Ocean failed.