Q&A with Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin

SpaceX trucked its Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft — refurbished with a new heat shield and structural enhancements — across the Cape Canaveral spaceport this week for attachment to a Falcon 9 rocket ahead of a planned liftoff next Thursday with four astronauts heading to the International Space Station.

A 229-foot-tall (70-meter) SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stood on launch pad 39A on Monday afternoon on the eve of a scheduled blastoff with the EchoStar 23 television broadcast satellite.

A test-firing of a Raptor engine on the latest in a series of Starship test rockets Tuesday night in Texas moved SpaceX closer to performing a low-altitude “hop” to gather data on the vehicle’s launch and landing characteristics.