Photos: Atlas 5 rolls out for launch

These photos taken Friday evening show the mobile gantry being wheeled away from a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, hours before its scheduled blastoff with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.

A space-bound NASA satellite was hauled aboard a military transport aircraft from a Southern California factory to the launch site in Florida on Friday and its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket booster arrived by sea from the manufacturing plant in Alabama today.

Lockheed Martin’s launch services team hopes to lure up to four commercial customers per year to fly on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 booster as a stream of U.S. government missions is forecast to dry up starting in 2017, according to Lockheed Martin’s rocket sales chief.