Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

The U.S. Air Force this week awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a Global Positioning System satellite in early 2019, concluding the second of as many as 15 competitions the military plans to run over the next year to pit SpaceX against United Launch Alliance for rights to lift defense and intelligence-gathering payloads into orbit.

Four magnetic explosion probes in a towering stack atop an Atlas 5 rocket rode a fountain of flame off the launch pad and into Earth orbit Thursday night for a $1.1 billion NASA science investigation into a universal force of nature.

Jared Isaacman, an entrepreneur who flew to space twice as a commercial astronaut, was nominated for the position in early December and was voted favorably out of committee in late April. A replacement hasn’t been named.