Watch Rocket Lab launch 2 satellites, recover booster on March 24 after delay

Rocket Lab has an action-packed launch planned for early Friday morning (March 24), and you can watch it live.

A two-stage Electron rocket is scheduled to launch two satellites to low Earth orbit from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Friday. Liftoff was originally expected to take place at 3:45 a.m. EDT (0745 GMT; 8:45 p.m. local New Zealand time), but was delayed to 5:14 a.m. EDT due to a strong geomagnetic storm caused by increased solar activity.

Earthly weather caused the scrub of the mission's previous launched attempt on Wednesday (March 22).

The Electron's first stage will come back to Earth under parachutes and make a soft ocean splashdown, if all goes according to plan. Rocket Lab will then recover the booster for analysis, to inform its quest to make the Electron partially reusable.

You can watch the mission, which Rocket Lab calls "The Beat Goes On," live here at Space.com or directly via Rocket Lab. Coverage is expected to begin about 20 minutes before liftoff.

Related: Rocket Lab launches 1st Electron booster from US soil in twilight liftoff

The two satellites going up on Friday belong to Seattle-based company BlackSky, which "combines high-resolution images captured by its constellation of microsatellites with its proprietary artificial intelligence software to deliver analytics and insights to industries including transportation, infrastructure, land use, defense, supply chain management and humanitarian aid," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description.

That constellation currently consists of 14 satellites, nine of which have been lofted by Rocket Lab.

See more