Stuff We Launched Into Space This Week: The U.S. Military's MUOS-5 Satellite

With gun control protests in Congress and markets reeling over the UK's decision to leave the European Union, there wasn't much time to focus on extraterrestrial events this week. But what goes up inevitably effects our world below, so Motherboard is keeping track of important things leaving Earth's atmosphere in a segment we call This Week In Stuff We Launched Into Space.

Friday saw the month of June's second U.S. military liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the launch of the fifth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a tactical communications satellite developed for the U.S. Navy.

MUOS-5 was carried into geosynchronous orbit via Atlas V rocket, the vehicle of choice for many U.S. launches. When deployed, the MUOS-5 payload will join its siblings to provide U.S. military SATCOM, or satellite communications, to soldiers on the ground.

Specifically, the new addition to the MUOS constellation will be positioned to provide further coverage of the planet's polar regions than ever before, according to the satellite's manufacturer Lockheed Martin. That's going to be crucial as rapidly receding ice caps bring more and more pesky human activity into the arctic.

It's also the first Atlas V launch since March, when a fuel pressure malfunction caused the rocket's engine to shut down prematurely while delivering cargo to the International Space Station (the cargo eventually made it into its intended orbit).

The satellite was built by Lockheed, and its reflectors were designed by Harris Corporation, which you may remember as the shadowy defense company responsible for supplying law enforcement agencies with their infamous Stingray cellphone mass-surveillance devices.

MUOS-5 is not the only US military satellite to go up this month. Last week, amateur satellite trackers located the National Reconnaissance Office's highly classified Mentor-7 eavesdropping satellite, which was launched into geosynchronous orbit by the massive Delta IV-Heavy rocket in early June.

The next Atlas V mission, dubbed NROL-61, is scheduled for late July, when the US government launches yet another classified spy satellite from Cape Canaveral.