Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

Maintaining a rapid-fire launch cadence to close out the year, China added two more Beidou satellites to its independent positioning, navigation and timing fleet Saturday with a successful launch aboard a Long March 3B rocket.

Running more than three months late, a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket took off Thursday and carried a U.S. government spy satellite into an orbit thousands of miles above Earth in the first mission from the newly-renamed Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

A dramatic automatic abort 7.5 seconds before the planned liftoff of a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket Saturday night kept the towering launcher on the pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, with a top secret spy payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.