Photos: News media shots of the NROL-52 liftoff

United Launch Alliance called off the launch of a Delta 2 rocket from California’s Central Coast early Tuesday after boats ventured into a restricted safety exclusion zone and engineers ran out of time to resolve a technical problem on the launcher.

Firing off a launch pad on the fringes of the Amazon rainforest, a European Vega rocket climbed into space Tuesday night and deployed a new optical surveillance craft for the Italian military and a French-Israeli environmental satellite to monitor vegetation, snow cover and coastal waterways.

Three veteran space fliers rode a Soyuz rocket into orbit Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, heading to the International Space Station for a five-month stay.