Video: Take a virtual ride on the Atlas 5 launch pad emergency ziplines

Air Force meteorologists on this Good Friday have released their initial forecast for Tuesday’s launch of a cargo ship to the International Space Station, predicting favorable conditions to fly the Atlas 5 booster on a commercial mission.

United Launch Alliance teams at Cape Canaveral launched an Atlas 5 rocket at 6:13 a.m. EDT (1013 GMT) Thursday with the U.S. Air Force’s fifth Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite. The AEHF 5 satellite will join a network of geostationary relay stations providing secure, jam-resistant video, voice and data links for the U.S. military.

Four veteran astronauts have been selected to train for launch aboard new commercial crew capsules being built by Boeing and SpaceX that are intended to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting in 2017, NASA announced Thursday.