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

SpaceX kicked off Memorial Day weekend with an overnight launch Saturday from Cape Canaveral, boosting a nearly five-ton communications satellite into orbit for Arabsat, a multinational consortium providing TV and video broadcast services across the Middle East.

An unmanned cargo freighter carrying nearly four tons of supplies and science, launched and operated commercially for NASA, blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday atop an Atlas 5 rocket bound for the International Space Station.

When the first Delta 2 rocket took off on Valentine’s Day 1989, ideas like navigating by smartphone and driving robots on Mars were science fiction. More than 150 launches over the last 30 years helped change all that.