A Vega rocket lifted off from a tropical launch pad in French Guiana at 1351 GMT (8:51 a.m. EST) Monday with Gokturk 1, a sharp-eyed reconnaissance satellite built in France and owned by the Turkish armed forces.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral at 3:28 a.m. EDT (0728 GMT) today to place a classified surveillance satellite into space for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. Follow the ascent in our live journal.

NASA fired up four hydrogen-fueled main engines on the core stage of the first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket Thursday in on a test stand in Mississippi, a redo of a crucial hot fire test that was cut short in January by technical issues. The engines burned more than eight minutes in an apparently successful test.