Video: Falcon 9 fires up engines on pad 39A (members only)

This is the second award from the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Space Vehicle (SV) Processing Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) contract. Blue Origin will receive $78.25 million for the work.

The four members of the SpaceX Crew-11 flight were previously set to fly on different missions before they ended up as a quartet on the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is scheduled for no earlier than Friday, Aug. 1, at 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 UTC).

United Launch Alliance technicians raised the first stage of the company’s next Atlas 5 rocket onto a mobile launch platform at Cape Canaveral Thursday, kicking off the launch vehicle’s build-up for a mission scheduled for liftoff May 16 with the U.S. military’s hush-hush X-37B spaceplane.