Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

The opening volley in the transformation of U.S. weather forecasting was mounted atop its ride to space today for the planned Nov. 19 launch that begins an $11 billion upgrade in the nation’s meteorology capability.

An automatic alarm in the final two minutes of the Delta 4-Heavy rocket’s countdown early Saturday forced officials to delay blastoff with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe by 24 hours.

A Japanese Epsilon rocket launched Tuesday from the Uchinoura Space Center, a shoreline spaceport on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, with a space weather research probe to study phenomena inside the turbulent Van Allen radiation belts. Liftoff of the 85-foot-tall rocket occurred at 1100 GMT (6 a.m. EST).