Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

NASA’s nuclear-powered Perseverance rover is set to arrive at Mars on Thursday with a make-or-break entry, descent, and landing. The rover will execute the arrival autonomously, while engineers and scientists back on Earth will have a nail-biting 11-minute wait for signals to reach home confirming the fate of the $2.7 billion mission.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, standing 194 feet tall and and weighing a million pounds, unleashes two million pounds of thrust from its main engine and three solid-fuel boosters today to launch the EchoStar 19 commercial Internet broadcast satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

After a terminal countdown abort Sunday night, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with the next 60 Starlink internet satellites Thursday at 3:24 a.m. EST (0824 GMT). The Falcon 9 took off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, and its first stage booster successfully landed on SpaceX’s offshore drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.