Live coverage: Commercial cargo craft completes space station rendezvous

SpaceX’s launch team in Cape Canaveral fueled a Falcon 9 rocket with super-chilled liquid propellants and briefly fired the first stage’s nine Merlin engines Monday in a customary preflight test ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled liftoff of a commercial television broadcasting satellite for the Asia-Pacific.

NASA has signed a $490 million agreement with the Russian government to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station in 2018 and 2019 as a hedge in case of delays to Boeing and SpaceX crew capsules.

Vaulting into a starry sky over Florida’s Space Coast, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully took off early Sunday with a Japanese video and data relay satellite, then stuck a landing on a barge stationed nearly 400 miles east of Cape Canaveral.