Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

The world’s most powerful operational rocket flashed to life at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) Tuesday and climbed into a moonlit summer sky from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the same site where the Apollo 11 astronauts left Earth for their historic moon landing nearly 50 years ago.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket launched at 5:02 p.m. EST (2202 GMT) Thursday from Cape Canaveral with NOAA’s GOES-S weather satellite, the second in a series of upgraded observatories destined to cover the western United States and the Pacific Ocean.

A European Vega rocket is scheduled to launch Tuesday from a tropical spaceport in South America carrying two Israeli-built satellites for the Italian military and a French-Israeli environmental observatory.