Video: Delta 4 lifts off

While recovery teams continue combing through the test site at Cape Canaveral where SpaceX’s first space-worthy Crew Dragon capsule was destroyed in an explosive accident last month, engineers a few miles away are pressing ahead with the company’s 17th resupply mission to the International Space Station set for launch early Friday.

SpaceX and United Launch Alliance expect to resume launches with little or no delay after Hurricane Irma veered west of Cape Canaveral last weekend, sparing the launch base from the storm’s most extreme damage.

A Japanese H-2B rocket fired into orbit Tuesday from the Tanegashima Space Center with an automated cargo freighter loaded with more than 4.1 tons of batteries, experiments, spacewalk equipment, water and provisions for the International Space Station.