Q&A with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO

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 Starlink 17-7 mission is the penultimate planned launch of these broadband satellites in August. SpaceX is targeting liftoff from pad 4E at 9:59 p.m. PDT (12:59 a.m. EDT / 0459 UTC).

Three experimental satellites sponsored by the U.S. military lifted off on an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab’s commercial spaceport in New Zealand on Sunday at 0600 GMT (2 a.m. EDT).