Photos: Atlas 5 rocket aims for International Space Station

Almost exactly three days after taking off a few miles to the north at the Kennedy Space Center on SpaceX’s historic first crew launch, a 15-story-tall Falcon rocket booster returned to Florida’s Space Coast Tuesday aboard a football field-sized drone ship.

Rocket Lab’s seventh and final launch of the year delivered a small radar observation satellite into orbit for Synspective, a Japanese startup planning a fleet of 30 or more Earth-imaging spacecraft providing day-and-night imagery of cities around the world.

SpaceX launched the first of the company’s upgraded generation of Falcon 9 launchers, known as Block 5, from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT). The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off with Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, and SpaceX recovered the rocket’s first stage on a vessel in the Atlantic Ocean.