Photos: Another SBIRS soars atop Atlas 5

Set to fly in its most powerful configuration with five solid rocket boosters, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket rolled out to Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad Tuesday in preparation for a planned blastoff two days later with a U.S. military communications satellite.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft today moved a step closer to starting a voyage to explore an uncharted world in our solar system — the mountain-sized Asteroid Bennu — by joining the booster rocket that will propel it from Earth next week.

Look back on the May 30 launch of a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with this gallery of photos showing the 19-story launcher climbing into the sky with the Yamal 601 communications satellite.