Watch the Falcon Heavy roar to life

A new four-stage rocket operated by the Chinese launch company Galactic Energy succeeded on its inaugural flight Saturday, delivering a data relay microsatellite to an orbit 300 miles above Earth.

Kennedy Space Center officials said Tuesday that Hurricane Matthew knocked out the main cooling system for the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building and surrounding structures, but they expect no lingering effects from the storm on NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spaceship scheduled for their first full-scale test flight around the moon in 2018.

A test-firing of a Raptor engine on the latest in a series of Starship test rockets Tuesday night in Texas moved SpaceX closer to performing a low-altitude “hop” to gather data on the vehicle’s launch and landing characteristics.