Video: Atlas takes flight with Cygnus

Fresh off a major design review, SpaceX’s human-rated Dragon spaceship has received the first of up to six firm mission orders from NASA under the company’s $2.6 billion commercial crew contract.

Orbital ATK’s Pegasus XL rocket will take about eight minutes to reach orbit with NASA’s eight CYGNSS weather research microsatellites, then comes deployment of the spacecraft more than 300 miles above Earth.

The last flight of the single-core variant of United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4 rocket lifted off at 9:06 a.m. EDT (1306 GMT) Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The 207-foot-tall launcher carried a GPS navigation satellite into orbit for the U.S. Air Force.