Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

The launch is a rideshare mission with secondary payloads from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, AstroForge and Epic Aerospace. Liftoff happened Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7:16 p.m. EST (0016 UTC).

Steve Skladanek leads Lockheed Martin’s rocket sales force charged with pushing the Atlas 5 rocket, which has largely been on the sidelines of the commercial launch business in recent years, on the global satellite market.

It was the first failure of a Falcon 9 rocket in flight since 2015. Liftoff occurred at 7:35 p.m. PDT (10:35 p.m. EDT, 0235 UTC) from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.