Photos: Atlas 5 rolls out for launch

A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:26 p.m. EDT Friday (0026 GMT Saturday) with the U.S. Air Force’s tenth Wideband Global SATCOM satellite, extending the reach of the military’s highest-capacity satellite communications network.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, standing 189 feet tall and and weighing 720,000 pounds, unleashes 860,000 pounds of thrust from its main engine to launch the SBIRS GEO Flight 3 early-warning satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Cocooned inside the nose cone of its Falcon 9 rocket booster, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane journeyed from a former space shuttle hangar at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, past the Vehicle Assembly Building and toward launch pad 39A last week ahead of liftoff Thursday.