Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

A commercial SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule packed with a robot assistant for the International Space Station’s crew, pouches of extra strong coffee, and a NASA science instrument designed to track the health of plants on Earth left Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 rocket Friday on a three-day pursuit of the orbiting research lab.

SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral raised a Falcon 9 rocket vertical at the Complex 40 launch pad and performed a static fire test Friday. The Falcon 9 will be used to launch a commercial geostationary communications satellite no earlier than Monday at 7:10 p.m. EST (0010 GMT Tuesday).

The Falcon 9 launched a day before the company begins publicly trading on the Nasdaq. Liftoff from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California happened at 8:05:59 a.m. PDT (11:05:59 a.m. EDT / 1505:59 UTC).