Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

United Launch Alliance teams mounted a top secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office on top of an Atlas 5 rocket Monday at Cape Canaveral in preparation for a liftoff scheduled just after sunset Nov. 3.

The next flight of the U.S. military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane — scheduled for liftoff May 16 from Cape Canaveral — will carry more experiments into orbit than any of the winged ship’s previous missions, including two payloads for NASA and a small deployable satellite built by Air Force Academy cadets.

Standing on a seaside launch pad overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a Minotaur-C rocket is set for launch Tuesday from California’s Central Coast with 10 Earth observation satellites manufactured in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.