Time-lapse: Falcon 9 lifted vertical on pad 39A (members only)

The first of up to seven United Launch Alliance missions lifted off Jan. 19 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where a Delta 4-Heavy launcher fired into orbit with 2.1 million pounds of thrust from three hydrogen-fueled RS-68A main engines with a U.S. government spy satellite.

United Launch Alliance has packed two days of rollout, countdown and launch activities into a two-minute video highlighting Friday night’s blastoff of an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral with the U.S. Air Force’s SBIRS GEO Flight 4 missile-warning satellite.

One week after two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut arrived at the International Space Station, the three crew members they’re replacing strapped into their own Soyuz spacecraft, undocked and returned to Earth Wednesday with a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 196-day mission.