Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

After a six-week delay for undisclosed reasons, SpaceX raised a Falcon 9 vertical on its launch pad Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for another try early Friday to send into orbit the company’s next batch of Starlink Internet relay stations and a pair of commercial BlackSky Earth-imaging microsatellites.

Last year’s fatal crash of Virgin Galactic’s suborbital rocket plane has delayed the start of the company’s commercial operations at least a year, prompting a change in mindset from a “period of euphoria to a period of real, measurable, but tough progress” as the enterprise backed by Richard Branson enters the second decade since its founding.

An upgraded, cyber-hardened $1 billion satellite to support the U.S. military’s missile defense systems rode into orbit from Cape Canaveral Tuesday at the tip of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.