Video: Time lapse of ATV’s final departure from ISS

Unimpeded by rain showers and a dark gray blanket of low clouds, an Ariane 5 rocket thundered away from a European-run space base in the jungle of French Guiana Tuesday to place four Galileo navigation satellites in orbit, an on-target deployment that should improve the location accuracy of new smartphones around the world.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket failed approximately 2 minutes, 20 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Sunday. Watch a video of the dramatic launch failure, plus a slowed-down high-definition version at one-tenth normal speed.

Russian launch crews stood up a Soyuz rocket Sunday on its launch mount in Kazakhstan for a scheduled liftoff Wednesday with approximately 5,500 pounds of supplies, experiments, fuel and several small satellites to be released by spacewalking cosmonauts at the International Space Station later this year.