Live coverage: Russian-American-British crew launches toward space station

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:24 p.m. EST (2324 GMT) Thursday with the U.S. military’s next GPS navigation satellite. The mission was delayed more than a month after a previous countdown was aborted seconds before liftoff.

A NASA instrument built to help astronomers learn about the structure and behavior of neutron stars, super-dense stellar skeletons left behind by massive explosions, has been mounted to an observation post outside the International Space Station after delivery aboard a SpaceX supply ship earlier this month.

Flying on its 40th mission, a Japanese H-2A rocket lifted off at 0408 GMT (12:08 a.m. EDT) Monday from the Tanegashima Space Center carrying Japan’s GOSAT 2 satellite to measure greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and the KhalifaSat Earth observation satellite for the United Arab Emirates.