Video: Saturday’s SpaceX launch

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ferried a multinational crew into orbit at the break of dawn Friday with a spectacular sky-lighting launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, dazzling early risers along the East Coast with a flawless start to a planned six-month expedition on the International Space Station.

These photos show the June 12 launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with three Earth-observing satellites for Canada’s Radarsat Constellation Mission.

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.