Spectators watch the final fiery moments of the Starship test flight

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida happened Monday at 8:35 a.m. EDT (1235 UTC), after four earlier attempts were scrubbed.

The U.S. Air Force this week awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a Global Positioning System satellite in early 2019, concluding the second of as many as 15 competitions the military plans to run over the next year to pit SpaceX against United Launch Alliance for rights to lift defense and intelligence-gathering payloads into orbit.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule packed with more than 5,000 pounds of hardware, provisions and experiments launched July 25 from Cape Canaveral and arrived at the International Space Station two days later.