Watch the Falcon Heavy fire up its engines

SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 booster powered up to full throttle in a brief ignition at the company’s Central Texas test site this week as engineers prepare for the rocket’s return to flight as soon as mid-November with a European communications satellite.

A day-and-a-half after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, a SpaceX Dragon supply ship arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday with more than 5,800 pounds of experiments, provisions and other hardware to support the orbiting lab’s six-person crew. The cargo capsule was captured by the station’s robotic arm at 6:40 a.m. EDT (1040 GMT).

The first launch for Iridium’s next-generation mobile communications fleet has been pushed back four months — from December until April — to resolve a technical problem inside the spacecraft’s Ka-band communications payload.