Video: Falcon 9 fires up engines for static fire test (members only)

Liftoff of the Starlink 17-38 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California happened at 9:35 a.m. PDT (12:35 p.m. EDT / 1635 UTC).

The first operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Oct. 23, following a formal certification review to assess data from the Crew Dragon’s two-man test flight that concluded earlier this month, NASA said Friday.

Engineers scrambled to keep NASA’s billion-dollar asteroid-bound OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on track for its launch last week in the aftermath of an explosion a mile away at SpaceX’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral.