Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

NASA has decided to launch the multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission — a spacecraft to study a moon of Jupiter with an icy crust covering a liquid water ocean — aboard a commercial heavy-lift rocket in October 2024, and not on the government-owned Space Launch System, officials said Wednesday.

The SXM-10 satellite launch comes six months after the SXM-9 satellite was launched from Florida. SpaceX is targeting liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday, June 7 at 12:54 a.m. EDT (0454 UTC).

A European Vega rocket lifted off Tuesday from the Guiana Space Center on the northern shoreline of South America with a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite for the Moroccan government. Launch occurred at 8:42:31 p.m. EST Tuesday (0142:31 GMT Wednesday) from Kourou, French Guiana.