Video: Delta 4 launch highlights

A heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket hurled a 9-ton Chinese spacecraft toward the moon Monday on a 23-day mission attempting to return lunar samples to Earth for the first time in 44 years.

The final flight of a Delta 2 rocket, a mainstay of the U.S. launch industry for nearly 30 years, began at 6:02 a.m. PDT (9:02 a.m. EDT; 1302 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s ICESat 2 Earth science satellite.

Launching into a clear autumn sky at sunset, a Falcon 9 rocket took off Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and delivered the SES 11/EchoStar 105 communications satellite to orbit.