Q&A with Eric Smith, JWST program director

After two of the last three Vega rocket launches ended in failure, Arianespace launched another Vega launcher from French Guiana at 9:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0150 GMT Thursday) with Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 3 commercial Earth observation satellite and five secondary payloads.

Watch replays from launch pad and tracking cameras of the Orion AA-2 inflight abort test conducted at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 2, 2019.

The Japanese space agency said Thursday the launch of an X-ray astrophysics observatory is postponed from Friday due to a poor weather forecast at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.