Video: Press site view of SpaceX resupply launch (members only)

An optical reconnaissance satellite for the French military took off atop a Soyuz launcher Tuesday, riding the Russian-made rocket from a tropical spaceport in South America into a 300-mile-high polar orbit to begin a 10-year mission surveying the globe.

Ground crews at the Guiana Space Center in South America have spent the last few months preparing the BepiColombo spacecraft, a tandem mission with European and Japanese science orbiters bound for Mercury, for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.

Check out imagery from Friday’s liftoff of a previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket booster with the BulgariaSat 1 communications satellite from Florida’s Space Coast.