The Atlas V rocket was introduced in 2002, and the Atlas program has logged more than 600 launches to date.
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The launch occurred at 6:18 a.m., 19 minutes after the launch window opened.
The Atlas V rocket launch from Cape Canaveral was a success early Wednesday morning.
MUOS is the U.S. military’s next generation narrowband satellite communications system that supports both legacy Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) systems and new Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) systems.
An unmanned Atlas V rocket was successfully by United Launch Alliance from Florida on Wednesday to put a next-gen communications satellite belonging to the U.S. military into orbit.
“Over the next several days MUOS-4 will transition to reach its geosynchronous orbit location approximately 22,000 miles above Earth to begin initial on-orbit testing”, read the statement from MUOS builder Lockheed Martin.
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While some may have thought it was a comet or a UFO, it turned out to be a Navy communications satellite being launched into space. “The Lockheed Martin-built MUOS-4 satellite will deliver voice, data, and video communications capability, similar to a cellular network, to our troops all over the globe”. “It is better than your cell phone and… this is very important for our war fighters”. It is the last piece needed in the Navy’s constellation of strategically-placed satellites that now will offer coverage around the world. The event was so unexpected that the National Weather Service office in Miami posted a tweet on its official Twitter page clarifying that what residents were seeing “was the Atlas 5 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, not a meteor”.
