Video: Halloween liftoff of Atlas 5 with GPS 2F-11

SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket ignited its Merlin main engines for several seconds Thursday at Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A ahead of a planned launch next week.

NASA fired up four hydrogen-fueled main engines on the core stage of the first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket Thursday in on a test stand in Mississippi, a redo of a crucial hot fire test that was cut short in January by technical issues. The engines burned more than eight minutes in an apparently successful test.

Two Earth-imaging satellites and an experimental solar sail payload rocketed into orbit Thursday aboard a Chinese Long March 4B launcher, the first flight for China’s Long March 4 rocket family since an upper stage failure in May.