Q&A with Emiliano Kargieman, founder and CEO of Satellogic (members only)

Persevering through a global pandemic, a last-minute earthquake, and the trials of a rocket launch, NASA’s next Mars rover — named Perseverance — took off from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet with sophisticated science instruments, technology to collect samples for to Earth, and the first interplanetary helicopter that could produce a “Wright Brothers moment” on another world.

United Launch Alliance teams ran through an 11-hour countdown Friday at Cape Canaveral to rehearse procedures before the first flight of a modified Atlas 5 rocket with Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule Dec. 20.

United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4-Heavy rocket lifted off at 11:10 a.m. PST (2:10 p.m. EST; 1910 GMT) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, after a month-long delay to troubleshoot a hydrogen leak in one of its boosters. The heavy-lifter was on a mission to send a U.S. government spy satellite into orbit.