Watch the Falcon Heavy roar to life

SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket ignited its Merlin main engines for several seconds Thursday at Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A ahead of a planned launch next week.

The next launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket has been delayed from July to October to await the readiness of its U.S. military payload, and the following Falcon Heavy flight has been rescheduled from late this year to some time in 2022, military officials said.

Working under the cloud of the global coronavirus pandemic, technicians and engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have installed a rotor-driven drone on the agency’s next Mars rover and fueled the spacecraft’s “sky crane” landing system in preparation for launch in July.