Nineteen orbital rockets launched from Florida's Space Coast during January and February, accelerating the 2025 Eastern Range schedule to a record-breaking pace that would topple last year's record of 93 annual liftoffs.

Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson is in Florida this week to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Follow along in print and online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.

The crew consists of NASA's Anne McClain (commander) and Nichole Ayers (pilot), JAXA's Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.

"EZIE is the first mission dedicated exclusively to studying the electrojets," Larry Kepko, an EZIE mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. "It does so with a completely new measurement technique."

The new version of Starship will be tested again in four to six weeks. A third consecutive failure could indicate fundamental problems with the updated design.

One rocket’s chief passenger was SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a 100 colors that are invisible to the human eye.