A new aerospace company reached orbit with its second rocket launch and deployed multiple small satellites on Saturday.

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, in early morning darkness and arced over the Pacific.

"100% mission success," Firefly tweeted later.

A day earlier, an attempt to launch abruptly ended when the countdown reached zero. The first-stage engines ignited but the rocket automatically aborted the liftoff.

The rocket's payload included multiple small satellites designed for a variety of technology experiments and demonstrations, as well as educational purposes.

The mission, dubbed "To The Black," was the company's second demonstration flight of its entry into the market for small satellite launchers.

The first Alpha was launched from Vandenberg on Sept. 2, 2021, but did not reach orbit.

One of the four first-stage engines shut down prematurely but the rocket continued upward on three engines into the supersonic realm where it tumbled out of control.

The rocket was then intentionally destroyed by an explosive flight termination system.

Firefly Aerospace said the premature shutdown was traced to an electrical issue, but that the rocket had otherwise performed well and useful data was obtained during the nearly 2 1/2 minutes of flight.

The US space agency, which was forced to postpone its latest liftoff attempt due to massive Hurricane Ian which hammered Florida this week, announced it was preparing its next launch window for between November 12 and November 27.

"Over the coming days," NASA said in a blog post, the team will assess conditions and necessary work and "identify a specific date for the next launch attempt."

Officials had so far refused to completely shut the door on an earlier attempt in October.

The SLS rocket, the most powerful ever designed by NASA, had to be returned to its storage hangar at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday in order to shelter it from the approach of Hurricane Ian.

The storm devastated parts of Florida but the rocket itself suffered no damage, NASA said.

Planning efforts for the November launch window will allow "time for employees at Kennedy to address the needs of their families and homes after the storm" and in the run up to the next mission attempt.

Venus, often called Earth's "evil twin" planet, formed closer to the sun and has since evolved quite differently from our own planet. It has a "runaway" greenhouse effect (meaning heat is completely trapped), a thick carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, no magnetic field and a surface hot enough to melt lead.

Several uncrewed scientific missions will study how and why that happened in the next decade. But now some scientists want to send a crewed mission there as well for a flyby. Is that a good idea?

With a slightly smaller diameter than Earth, Venus orbits closer to the sun. This means that any water on the surface would have evaporated shortly after its formation, starting its greenhouse effect. Early and sustained volcanic eruptions created lava plains and increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—starting the runaway greenhouse effect, which increased the temperature from just a little higher than Earth's to its current high value of 475°C.

While the Venus year is shorter than ours (225 days), its rotation is very slow (243 days) and "retrograde"—the other way round to Earth. The slow rotation is related to a lack of magnetic field, resulting in a continuing loss of atmosphere.