Photos: Atlas launch seen from pad cameras

The final flight of a Delta 2 rocket, a mainstay of the U.S. launch industry for nearly 30 years, began at 6:02 a.m. PDT (9:02 a.m. EDT; 1302 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s ICESat 2 Earth science satellite.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the spacecraft that will grab a piece of Asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth, shipped to Kennedy Space Center from the Lockheed Martin production facilities in Denver on May 20 aboard an Air Force C-17.

Putting on a holiday light show for Southern California and much of the desert southwest, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket fired into a twilight sky from the Pacific coastline Friday night to add 10 new satellites to Iridium’s upgraded communications network.