Video: SpaceX Dragon departs space station

SpaceX’s ground team hydraulically hoisted a 213-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket vertical at pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center before dawn Monday ahead of a planned liftoff with a space station-bound robotic resupply craft.

This mission was the second of two Falcon 9 flights on Sunday night. Liftoff from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base occurred at 9:09 p.m. PDT (12:09 a.m. EDT, 0409 UTC).

When SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket takes off with 64 small satellites — a payload cache representing 34 customers in 17 nations — it will be just the first act in a nearly five-hour sequence to deftly deploy each of the spacecraft, which range in size from a Rubik’s cube to a refrigerator.