Shannon Lucid gives a guided tour of the Mir space station

A decommissioned missile originally built in Russia to deliver nuclear weapons to intercontinental targets in the United States vaulted out of a vertical canister Friday and fired into space with a European satellite to monitor global air pollution.

Spectacular video of the twilight launch of a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket carrying the GPS 2F-6 navigation satellite on May 16, 2014.

Look back on last week’s launch of a Russian Proton rocket from Kazakhstan with the EchoStar 21 communications satellite, a commercial craft designed to beam broadband connectivity to customers across Europe.