Photos: EchoStar 19 launch as seen from press site

With an international flair for collaboration, a military communications satellite jointly purchased by five allies was rocketed in space Saturday to further expand the U.S.-operated network that serves battlefield forces anywhere on Earth.

Russia sent a spy satellite into orbit aboard a Soyuz rocket Feb. 2 from a snowy launch pad at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, setting off on a mission to detect, locate, and characterize foreign military radio signals.

The second flight of China’s new medium-lift Long March 7A rocket successfully placed an experimental satellite into orbit Thursday, following a failed launch of the same configuration last year caused by a problem in a booster liquid oxygen system.