Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) to begin a three-and-a-half hour mission to deliver two dozen satellites into three distinct orbits. The Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters returned to Cape Canaveral for successful landings, but the center core stage crashed during a landing attempt on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA’s small Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, sent to the moon last year to search for water ice deposits at the lunar south pole, will not be able to complete its science mission after a problem with the probe’s propulsion system.

A European-built Ariane 5 rocket launched Tuesday with a U.S.-made communications satellite for Tokyo-based Sky Perfect JSAT and a South Korean environmental observatory. The heavy-lift Ariane 5 launcher took off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:18 p.m. EST (2218 GMT; 7:18 p.m. French Guiana time).