Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

A heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket hurled a 9-ton Chinese spacecraft toward the moon Monday on a 23-day mission attempting to return lunar samples to Earth for the first time in 44 years.

With a fix in place for a propulsion system alarm that cut short a countdown in the final seconds Monday, U.S. time, Rocket Lab readied an Electron rocket for another try Wednesday night, but unfavorable upper level winds kept the booster grounded. The Electron rocket is awaiting launch on a test flight aiming to deliver three small commercial CubeSats to orbit from a remote New Zealand launch pad.

Nine small Chinese satellites, including a technology experiment to test out ways to capture space debris, rode a Long March 6 rocket into orbit April 27 on a rideshare mission managed by China Great Wall Industry Corp., the government-owned enterprise charged with selling Chinese launch services on the commercial market.