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

NASA has selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — flying with a reused first stage booster — to launch the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer mission from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in April 2021, bypassing Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus rocket for the task.

The Falcon 9 booster assigned to launch two NASA astronauts on an orbital test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has been test-fired in Texas, but the schedule for the long-awaited mission remains unclear.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with 10 new satellites for Iridium’s upgraded communications network in low Earth orbit.