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

A Boeing-built satellite on the way to join Inmarsat’s globe-spanning network geared to beam Internet and data transmission capacity to airline passengers, maritime crews and military personnel flew into orbit Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard an expendable Falcon 9 rocket.

The maker of inflatable technology for a commercial space station will use a top-of-the-line Atlas 5 rocket with a stretched nose cone to hoist the first habitat into Earth orbit in 2020.

Riding a half-million pounds of thrust, a Minotaur 4 rocket fired off a launch pad in Virginia, surpassed the speed of sound in less than 20 seconds, and vaulted into orbit Wednesday with four classified payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office.