Photos: Delta 4 awaits blastoff

Technicians around Cape Canaveral spent the last four weeks assembling a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and preparing a Lockheed Martin-built NOAA weather satellite for liftoff March 1.

SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket was hydraulically hoisted vertical Sunday morning at launch pad 39A, less than 12 hours before a scheduled blastoff with the Intelsat 35e communications satellite.

A month after an X-37B mini-space shuttle glided to a landing on Kennedy Space Center’s runway in Florida, the U.S. Air Force announced Tuesday that the spaceplane’s next mission will launch in August aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the first time.