Photos: Falcon 9 launch from Press Site

These photos taken Friday evening show the mobile gantry being wheeled away from a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, hours before its scheduled blastoff with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.

The scheduled launch Saturday of two commercial BlackSky Earth-imaging satellites from New Zealand will double as an opportunity for Rocket Lab to test an enhanced heat shield on its Electron booster, an upgrade that should allow the company to recover rockets in better condition for eventual reuse.

The first launch by SpaceX for the U.S. Space Force on June 30 carried the third in a new line of modernized GPS navigation satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral.