Photos: Falcon takes flight

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine Merlin main engines for several seconds Thursday at launch pad 39A in Florida, moving the previously-flown booster closer to a scheduled blastoff Monday with a Bulgarian communications satellite.

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.

The NROL-48 mission was the fifth mission this year supporting the National Reconnaissance Office’s expansive low Earth orbit statellite constellation it calls the proliferated architecture. Liftoff from pad 4E occurred at 10:38 a.m. PDT (1:38 p.m. EDT / 1738 UTC).