Live coverage: Vega rocket launches with LISA Pathfinder

A Japanese Epsilon rocket launched Tuesday from the Uchinoura Space Center, a shoreline spaceport on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, with a space weather research probe to study phenomena inside the turbulent Van Allen radiation belts. Liftoff of the 85-foot-tall rocket occurred at 1100 GMT (6 a.m. EST).

International Space Station managers have named crew members to future expeditions to the research lab in 2017 and 2018, including the first German commander of a space mission and Canada’s third astronaut to fly a long-duration residency on the complex.

An optical reconnaissance satellite for the French military took off atop a Soyuz launcher Tuesday, riding the Russian-made rocket from a tropical spaceport in South America into a 300-mile-high polar orbit to begin a 10-year mission surveying the globe.