Q&A with Scott Bolton, principal investigator on NASA’s Juno mission

United Launch Alliance has released views from cameras mounted aboard the company’s most recent Atlas 5 rocket launch showing the rocket’s blastoff from Cape Canaveral at dawn Aug. 8 with a U.S. Air Force communications satellite.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket fired into the night sky over Cape Canaveral just after midnight Wednesday, carrying the U.S. Air Force’s fourth AEHF communications satellite designed to enable secure voice, video and data links between U.S. and allied forces.

The U.S. Air Force this week awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a Global Positioning System satellite in early 2019, concluding the second of as many as 15 competitions the military plans to run over the next year to pit SpaceX against United Launch Alliance for rights to lift defense and intelligence-gathering payloads into orbit.