Live coverage: Vega rocket launches with LISA Pathfinder

Take a walk around the Ariane 5 launch pad in French Guiana after the 16-story rocket arrived at the complex for liftoff Thursday with four European Galileo navigation satellites.

A solid-fueled Vega launcher fired through a low cloud deck and sped into orbit from the South American jungle early Thursday with a pioneering European spacecraft that marks a key step in a century-long quest to detect elusive gravitational waves predicted to permeate the cosmos.

The UK government and India’s Bharti Global mobile telecom operator announced Friday they placed the winning bid to purchase OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy in March while in the early stages of deploying a megaconstellation of broadband satellites.