Live coverage: SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket test-fired in Florida

The U.S. Air Force has released an infrared video and additional images from Sunday’s landing of the military’s X-37B spaceplane in Florida after a top secret mission that lasted more than two years.

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.

Photos from the liftoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early Monday from Cape Canaveral show the 20-story launcher climbing into a starry sky with the SES 12 communications satellite.