Live coverage: Atlas 5 countdown and launch journal

The Atlas 5 rocket blasts off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for its late-night ascent to deploy the NROL-42 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.

A space-bound NASA satellite was hauled aboard a military transport aircraft from a Southern California factory to the launch site in Florida on Friday and its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket booster arrived by sea from the manufacturing plant in Alabama today.

A Soyuz rocket with a three-person crew heading for the International Space Station lifted off at 1357 GMT (9:57 a.m. EDT) Wednesday in the final launch currently scheduled from Gagarin’s Start, a historic site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan from where Yuri Gagarin departed on the first human spaceflight in 1961. Beginning next year, Soyuz crews will blast off from a different pad at Baikonur.