Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket, made up of two previously-flown Falcon 9 boosters and a beefed up central core stage, made the trip to launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was raised vertical Thursday for testing ahead of its first liftoff next month.

The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket sits peacefully inside its mobile service gantry on Tuesday afternoon, one day before its scheduled launch of the GPS 2F-9 navigation satellite.

On its first launch of the year, a Russian-made Proton rocket lifted off Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with a French-built, Russian-owned communications satellite.