Photos: Atlas 5 rocket aims for International Space Station

Prognosticators are predicting favorable weather conditions to launch an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday and send NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on its interplanetary journey to interrogate an asteroid and collect a surface sample for return to Earth.

Running more than three months late, a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket took off Thursday and carried a U.S. government spy satellite into an orbit thousands of miles above Earth in the first mission from the newly-renamed Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The U.S. Air Force’s ninth Global Positioning System (GPS) 2F satellite, GPS 2F-9, is encapsulated in the Delta 4 rocket’s four-meter-diameter nose cone at a processing facility and then moved to the launch pad at Complex 37 for mating to its booster inside the mobile service tower.