Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

SpaceX is set to end a two-month launch drought at Cape Canaveral with a blastoff Thursday night carrying a privately-funded Israeli moon lander, an Indonesian communications satellite and a U.S. Air Force surveillance payload into orbit.

A fresh image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft released Tuesday showed the mission’s distant flyby target a billion miles beyond Pluto — nicknamed Ultima Thule — has an elongated shape like that of a peanut shell or a bowling pin, and the prospect of higher-resolution pictures arriving on Earth later in the day had scientists salivating for more.

A new variant of India’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle with two strap-on solid rocket boosters and an upper stage converted into an experiment-carrying platform debuted Thursday with a launch into polar orbit.