Live coverage: Falcon 9 rocket lifts off with fifth set of Iridium Next satellites

Last year’s fatal crash of Virgin Galactic’s suborbital rocket plane has delayed the start of the company’s commercial operations at least a year, prompting a change in mindset from a “period of euphoria to a period of real, measurable, but tough progress” as the enterprise backed by Richard Branson enters the second decade since its founding.

Riding on a mobile launch platform, an Ariane 5 rocket made the 1.7-mile trip from its final assembly building to the ELA-3 launch zone in Kourou, French Guiana, on Monday morning, one day before its blastoff on a commercial mission with Australian and Indian communications satellites.

The mission comes on the heels of SpaceX outlining the next test flight of its Starship rocket in southern Texas. Liftoff of the Starlink 6-60 mission happened at 10:24 a.m. EDT (1424 UTC) on Tuesday.