Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

A groundbreaking Friday ceremonially commenced construction of an astronaut access tower at United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 launch pad in Florida, a 200-foot-tall gantry that will add to the future of U.S. human spaceflight.

After years of delays, the core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System moon rocket rolled out of its New Orleans factory Wednesday, heading for a NASA site in Mississippi for a test-firing before engineers hope to ship the rocket to its Florida launch base by this fall.

China’s Long March 3B rocket, used to power navigation and communications satellites into high-altitude orbits, launched for the first time in nearly five months Sunday with two spacecraft for the country’s Beidou positioning network.