Wiktionary
n. A vehicle for transporting objects into space, usually a rocket.
Wikipedia
In spaceflight, a launch vehicle or carrier rocket is a rocket used to carry a payload from Earth's surface into outer space. A launch system includes the launch vehicle, the launch pad, and other infrastructure. Although a carrier rocket's payload is often an artificial satellite placed into orbit, some spaceflights, such as sounding rockets, are sub-orbital, while others enable spacecraft to escape Earth orbit entirely.
Earth orbital launch vehicles typically have at least two stages, and sometimes as many as four or more.
Usage examples of "launch vehicle".
So the tube is ringed with superconducting magnets, and your launch vehicle has the same thing down its long axis.
It came to serious money, too, enough to bribe the Floridian authorities who controlled the launch pads at the Cape, to hire pilots, to fight the Feds' lawyers through the courts until, reluctantly, they did give in and provide a launch vehicle for her.
Three of the ARMs found targets, killing two search radars and a missile-launch vehicle.
It frequently detected satellites, which mainly fly lower than ICBM warheads, but the computer that analyzed the tracks of everything that came into the system's view categorized this contact as exactly what it was, too high to be a low-orbit satellite, and too slow to be a launch vehicle.
In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle.
Now we have a proven heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of placing an entire space station with a crew of eight men on lunar soil.
And then von Braun's people called their new launch vehicle 'Saturn,' and so another classical god seemed a natural choice to Silverstein.
Boosted into space atop a powerful Atlas-Agena D launch vehicle, it was eventually placed in geosynchronous orbit above the equator near Indonesia.