Photos: Falcon takes flight

SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk said Thursday that the company’s recovery fleet in the Atlantic Ocean recovered the two halves of the Falcon Heavy’s payload shroud after the heavy-lifter’s second launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Musk said the company plans to reuse the fairing for the first time later this year.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Sunday from Cape Canaveral with 143 small satellites, a record number of spacecraft on a single mission, giving a boost to startup space companies and stressing the U.S. military’s tracking network charged with sorting out the locations of all objects in orbit.

Intelsat and SES, operators of the two largest fleets of geostationary communications satellites, have ordered 10 spacecraft from Maxar, Northrop Grumman and Boeing for launches beginning in 2022 to replace C-band capacity being transitioned to 5G cellular network services.