Live coverage: Ariane 5 blasts off with two Intelsat satellites

These photos of Thursday evening’s successful relaunch of a Falcon 9 rocket booster, which returned to Earth after a maiden mission last year, were taken at the Kennedy Space Center press site about 3.1 miles from launch pad 39A.

A Falcon 9 rocket core recovered after last week’s launch of a Thai communications satellite returned to port in Florida on Thursday as SpaceX preps a separate rocket structure for tests to prove it can withstand multiple missions and mulls pricing of a previously-flown rocket, targeting a re-flight of a used booster by the end of the summer.

Weeks after leaving its factory in New Orleans, the core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System flight has been raised into a test stand at the Stennis Space Center to begin a series of checkouts culminating in an eight-minute engine-firing later this year.