Live coverage: Atlas 5 blasts off with Navy satellite

The revised Atlas 5 rocket firing order includes two national security missions this summer before launching NASA’s daring asteroid sampler mission in September as originally planned.

SpaceX launched the first of the company’s upgraded generation of Falcon 9 launchers, known as Block 5, from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT). The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off with Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, and SpaceX recovered the rocket’s first stage on a vessel in the Atlantic Ocean.

A new-generation weather satellite launched in November promising to deliver better images of hurricanes, storms and clouds than any mission before has returned its first tantalizing pictures from geostationary orbit.