Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

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.

The first operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Oct. 23, following a formal certification review to assess data from the Crew Dragon’s two-man test flight that concluded earlier this month, NASA said Friday.

Just three weeks after the Delta 4-Heavy rocket left the launch pad on its way to a successful satellite-deployment mission for U.S. national security, a smaller booster in the family has rolled out for its August military flight.