Live coverage: Delta 2 launches

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket climbed into orbit from California’s Central Coast on Saturday, resuming service after an explosive setback last year and delivering much-needed reinforcements to Iridium’s satellite constellation providing communications by land, sea and sky.

For its first mission of the year, SpaceX launched the Airbus-built Turksat 5A communications satellite to cover Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa with data relay and television broadcast services. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:15 p.m. EST Thursday (0215 GMT Friday).

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.