Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

Officials have accepted a Friday launch date for a commercial cargo ship to the International Space Station after Range availability scuttled notions of moving up the Atlas 5 flight by a day.

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.

The MS-25 mission was scrubbed on Thursday, but the root cause is still under investigation. The earliest that liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome can now occur is Saturday, March 23, pending the outcome of the investigation.