Video: Weather causes Atlas 5 countdown hold

The U.S. Air Force on Thursday demolished towers once used to assemble Delta 2 rockets at Cape Canaveral for missions to Mars, four dozen flights to deploy the GPS navigation network, and numerous launches with scientific, commercial and military payloads.

A nuclear blast detection satellite and an assortment of experiments will be boosted directly into geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above Earth in 2019 by the most-powerful version of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket, the Air Force has decided.

United Launch Alliance will launch the USSF-106 mission as its first flight for the U.S. Space Force using a Vulcan rocket. The vehicle will carry two satellite missions onboard.