Launch of the Curiosity Mars rover

Europe’s ExoMars orbiter was enclosed inside the nose cone of its Proton rocket Wednesday ahead of its March 14 launch toward the red planet.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) to begin a three-and-a-half hour mission to deliver two dozen satellites into three distinct orbits. The Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters returned to Cape Canaveral for successful landings, but the center core stage crashed during a landing attempt on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

NOAA’s GOES-S weather satellite, the latest in a series of meteorological observatories dating back to 1975, lifted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.