Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

A classified satellite code-named Zuma, launched Sunday night atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, may have suffered a mission-ending failure during or shortly after the climb to space, according to news accounts Monday evening.

Streaking away from Cape Canaveral less than an hour before sunrise Wednesday, an Atlas 5 launcher painted a memorable spectacle in the skies over Florida, catching the first rays of the morning as it rocketed out of the stratosphere with a U.S. Navy communications satellite.

Follow the key events of the Soyuz rocket’s ascent into orbit from the Guiana Space Center with the first COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, or CSG 1, radar observation satellite, the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS exoplanet telescope, and three CubeSats.