Watch live: Vice President Pence visits Kennedy Space Center

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket thundered into the sky over Florida’s Space Coast Sunday night and deployed a sophisticated internet satellite for Viasat into a circular orbit more than 20,000 miles over the equator, delivering for a competitor to SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband network.

A privately-funded airlock from Nanoracks will head for the International Space Station this weekend in the trunk of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule, adding to the orbiting lab’s capacity for scientific experiments in another milestone for commercial space development.

NASA ground crews at the Kennedy Space Center are continuing to stack segments of the Space Launch System’s side-mounted solid rocket boosters on a mobile launch platform inside the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building.