Watch the Falcon 9 launch from pad 39A

SpaceX rolled a Falcon Heavy rocket back to its launch pad in Florida Tuesday night for liftoff Thursday with a high-power Viasat broadband satellite, following an eight-day delay for a launch vehicle engine swap.

NASA has decided to launch the multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission — a spacecraft to study a moon of Jupiter with an icy crust covering a liquid water ocean — aboard a commercial heavy-lift rocket in October 2024, and not on the government-owned Space Launch System, officials said Wednesday.

Japan’s Kounotori 6 cargo carrier will get a 15-minute boost from a powerful H-2B rocket to send the supply ship and its 4.5 tons of provisions and experiments on a four-day pursuit of the International Space Station.