Live coverage: Ariane 5 successful in middle-of-the-night launch

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the heaviest payload ever launched by SpaceX took off Monday morning from Cape Canaveral with 60 satellites for then company’s Starlink broadband network.

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.

A Vega rocket fired into space at 8:52 p.m. EST Monday (0152 GMT Tuesday) from the Guiana Space Center in South America, but the mission deviated from its planned trajectory. The rocket was boosting a Spanish Earth observation satellite and a French research payload into orbit.