Photos: Falcon takes flight

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral on Monday after a 49-minute weather hold to wait for clouds to thin out overhead. The rocket finally lifted off into an overcast sky with a communications satellite built for Turkmenistan.

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.

The Starlink 11-22 mission was SpaceX’s 50th Starlink launch of the year. Liftoff from pad 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base occurred at 4:40 p.m. PDT (7:40 p.m. EDT, 2340 UTC).