Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

The NROL-48 mission was the fifth mission this year supporting the National Reconnaissance Office’s expansive low Earth orbit statellite constellation it calls the proliferated architecture. Liftoff from pad 4E occurred at 10:38 a.m. PDT (1:38 p.m. EDT / 1738 UTC).

Two days after a successful launch from California, SpaceX fired off another Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Wednesday, this one carrying a Dragon cargo ship loaded with 5,660 pounds of equipment and supplies bound for the International Space Station.

SpaceX rolled out the company’s first space-worthy Crew Dragon spacecraft and its Falcon 9 launcher to pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first time Thursday, beginning a series of fit checks before the commercial spaceship takes off on its first orbital test flight.