Video: Antares rocket returns to flight with new engines

A SpaceX launch set for Nov. 11 will mark the first Falcon 9 mission to use a payload fairing from a previous flight, the company announced Tuesday, shortly after SpaceX engineers at Cape Canaveral test-fired the mission’s first stage booster, also refurbished and reused.

SpaceX’s second Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday with the Arabsat 6A communications satellite. The world’s most powerful operational launcher lifted off from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT), and its three first stage boosters landed less than 10 minutes later — two back at Cape Canaveral and one on a drone ship at sea.

America’s most experienced space flier and her three private astronaut crewmates undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth late Tuesday, blazing through the night sky like a fiery shooting star before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico.