Q&A with Giulio Ranzo, CEO of Avio (members only)

United Launch Alliance’s 50th mission for the U.S. Air Force lifted off at 12:15 a.m. EDT (0415 GMT) Wednesday. An Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral with the Air Force’s fourth Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory has resumed regular observations after NOAA and NASA engineers uplinked a software patch to the spacecraft a million miles from Earth, restoring data on space weather and a daily series views of the sunlit side of our home planet.

United Launch Alliance and SpaceX beat out Northrop Grumman and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for billions of dollars in U.S. military rocket contracts, and will share the load in launching the Pentagon’s highest-priority national security space missions through 2027, officials announced Friday.