Video: Vice President Al Gore attends DSCOVR launch

An interplanetary space weather station rocketed away from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, speeding toward a remote operating post a million miles from Earth to help forecasters warn of intense solar storms.

SpaceX says it is giving up on landing the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after Wednesday’s launch of a NOAA space weather observatory due to rough seas in the booster recovery zone off Florida’s East Coast.

Spectacular views from a NOAA space weather observatory show the sunlit far side of the moon crossing the face of the Earth from a distant vantage point a million miles away.