Photos: California’s predawn liftoff of Atlas 5 rocket

Isolated camera views from various locations around Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center show the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifting off with NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-M.

A geodetic surveying satellite for the Russian military successfully launched Friday aboard a Rockot booster — a modified ballistic missile — from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

Sixty years ago Monday, a 27-year-old Russian test pilot named Yuri Gagarin strapped into a Vostok capsule in Central Asia and rode into orbit atop a launcher derived from a Soviet nuclear missile, becoming the first human to travel into the void of space. Twenty years later, in 1981, the era of reusable spacecraft dawned with the first launch of NASA’s space shuttle.