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

Watch the launch of Expedition 49, a three-man crew headed for the International Space Station aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Technicians around Cape Canaveral spent the last four weeks assembling a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and preparing a Lockheed Martin-built NOAA weather satellite for liftoff March 1.

It will take approximately one hour for a Japanese H-2A rocket to propel the Hope Mars orbiter on a trajectory to escape Earth’s gravitational bond, kicking off a seven-month journey to the Red Planet.