Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

A communications payload owned by the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES will ride the first launch of an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket in mid-2015, SES officials said Friday.

Rising into a midnight sky lit by the full moon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral early Monday with a commercial cargo craft on the way to the International Space Station, then returned to Florida’s Space Coast for a dramatic nighttime landing.

Inmarsat has selected Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to launch the first of two planned sixth-generation communications satellites on an H-2A rocket in 2020, giving the Japanese launcher its second commercial win in the global market to loft large geostationary telecom craft.