A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral at 3:28 a.m. EDT (0728 GMT) today to place a classified surveillance satellite into space for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. Follow the ascent in our live journal.
An early bird rocket launch from the Florida spaceport will take to the skies before dawn Thursday when an Atlas 5 lofts a classified U.S. government satellite.
his photo gallery shows the classified National Reconnaissance Office payload, already encapsulated in the 14-foot-diameter nose cone, being lifted atop the United Launch Alliance Atlas-Centaur rocket at Cape Canaveral’s Vertical Integration Facility.
This is our comprehensive fact sheet previewing the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket deployment of the classified NROL-52 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.
SpaceX and United Launch Alliance expect to resume launches with little or no delay after Hurricane Irma veered west of Cape Canaveral last weekend, sparing the launch base from the storm’s most extreme damage.