Q&A with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO

China’s first X-ray astronomy satellite launched Thursday on a mission to survey the Milky Way galaxy for black holes and pulsars, the remnants left behind after a star burns up its nuclear fuel.

The primary payload, NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) was joined by two rideshare payloads heading to Lagrange Point 1. Liftoff from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center occurred at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 UTC).

Views from an airliner, close-up high-speed launch pad cameras, and photographers around the Guiana Space Center in the jungle of South America show the twilight launch of a European Ariane 5 rocket Saturday with three commercial satellites heading for orbits more than 22,000 miles over the equator.