At 10:52 a.m. local time (1:52 p.m. EDT; 1752 GMT) on Saturday (June 15), the countdown reached zero and a Prospector-18D rocket carrying four tiny CubeSats rose on a column of orange flames along its vertical launch rail.

The small rocket cleared the rail in the blink of an eye and arched over in the direction of Koehn Lake — a vast expanse of bone-dry desert that, on a much windier day, would have been engulfed in a dust storm right out of a French Foreign Legion movie. [See photos of the Prospector-18D launch]