Live coverage: SpaceX launches another batch of Starlink satellites

Photos released by SpaceX this week show how close the company’s payload fairing retrieval ship got to catching two halves of a nose shroud jettisoned from a Falcon 9 rocket that launched May 22 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

A United Launch Atlas 5 rocket is set to loft three military satellites for the U.S. Air Force on a mission codenamed AFSPC 11. This timeline shows the major mission events planned over a six-hour flight to a near-geostationary orbit.

Europe’s Sentinel 3B environmental satellite was shipped to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia’s far northern Arkhangelsk region in March for a month-long campaign to prepare the spacecraft for liftoff aboard a Rockot launcher.