Photos: More shots of Saturday’s Delta 4-Heavy rocket Launch

After the threat of lightning kept the mission on the ground Thursday, Arianespace and the European Space Agency successfully launched an Ariane 5 rocket Friday from Kourou, French Guiana, with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, a robotic spacecraft embarking on an eight-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet. Liftoff with ESA’s JUICE spacecraft occurred at 8:14 a.m. EDT (1214 UTC).

A little more than a year after the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first test flight, SpaceX teams on Florida’s Space Coast are readying the world’s most powerful operational launcher for its second mission Thursday with a commercial communications satellite.

Six years after launching for the first time, a Russian Angara A5 heavy-lift rocket took off on its second test flight Monday and successfully delivered a dummy payload into orbit.