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

NASA and industry teams at Cape Canaveral launched an Orion capsule on a three-minute atmospheric test flight Tuesday to prove the spaceship’s ability to escape from an exploding rocket during launch, demonstrating a key safety feature before astronauts ride the vehicle into deep space. Liftoff occurred at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

Sending the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on an interplanetary trajectory to Asteroid Bennu, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket thunders away from Cape Canaveral Thursday at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT).

A Russian satellite launched Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, riding a Proton booster and Block DM upper stage toward a position in geostationary orbit to provide weather observations over Siberia, other parts of Russia’s Far East, and the Asia-Pacific region.