Q&A with Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer at SES

NASA and the U.S. Air Force are expected to return to normal operations Tuesday after lawmakers passed a budget bill Monday evening, ending a government funding lapse that threatened to cut off live television coverage of an International Space Station spacewalk and interrupt SpaceX launch operations in Florida and California.

A communications payload owned by the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES will ride the first launch of an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket in mid-2015, SES officials said Friday.

Using a Falcon 9 booster flying for a record ninth time, SpaceX’s swift sequence of launches continued Sunday with a predawn liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center carrying another set of 60 Starlink internet satellites, the company’s third mission in 10 days.