Video: Atlas 5 rocket launches space station cargo mission

SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon spacecraft, fixed to the forward end of a Falcon 9 rocket, emerged Thursday from the company’s hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the quarter-mile journey to its launch mount at pad 39A, where liftoff is scheduled early Saturday on a critical test flight before astronauts strap into the ship later this year.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was raised vertical at Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Sunday ahead of a planned liftoff with Argentina’s SAOCOM 1A radar observation satellite, and the first landing of a SpaceX booster on the U.S. West Coast.

SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship departed the International Space Station on Wednesday, fired rocket thrusters to brake out of orbit, and parachuted to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean with approximately 3,461 pounds of experiment samples and equipment.