Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

After years of delays, the core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System moon rocket rolled out of its New Orleans factory Wednesday, heading for a NASA site in Mississippi for a test-firing before engineers hope to ship the rocket to its Florida launch base by this fall.

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover, 14 years past its original 90-day design life, has dropped out of contact with Earth after powering down everything but its master clock in a bid to weather a huge dust storm that is blotting out the sun, preventing the solar-powered rover from recharging its batteries, mission managers said Wednesday.

A powerful new Indian launcher and a precursor to a future piloted space capsule flew to the edge of space on a 20-minute test mission Thursday. See photos of the rocket’s liftoff and the landing craft after splashdown in the Bay of Bengal.