Q&A with Steve Skladanek, president of Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services

Engineers scrambled to keep NASA’s billion-dollar asteroid-bound OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on track for its launch last week in the aftermath of an explosion a mile away at SpaceX’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

For the fifth time in four years, a massive U.S. Navy satellite will launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket on Friday to finish the military’s new $7.7 billion mobile communications framework 22,300 miles in space.

The static fire test was conducted by Northrop Grumman, the manufacturer of the GEM 63XL solid rocket booster that can be used to help power United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rockets. An in-flight anomaly was observed on one of those back in mid-February.