Photos: Falcon 9 breaks apart en route to ISS

The launch is a rideshare mission with secondary payloads from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, AstroForge and Epic Aerospace. Liftoff happened Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7:16 p.m. EST (0016 UTC).

SpaceX ground teams at Cape Canaveral transferred a Falcon 9 rocket to launch pad 40 and rotated the booster vertical Monday for a preflight hold-down firing, ahead of a liftoff scheduled for Wednesday night carrying 60 satellites into orbit for the company’s planned Starlink broadband constellation.

Intuitive Machines, under contract to carry NASA science instruments to the moon on a privately-developed robotic spacecraft, said this week its first commercial lunar mission will target landing in October 2021 near a deep, narrow valley named Vallis Schröteri.