Watch the Falcon Heavy roar to life

A Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon supply ship, primarily using previously-flown hardware, are scheduled for liftoff before dawn Friday at Cape Canaveral on SpaceX’s 15th cargo launch to the International Space Station under contract to NASA.

The White House’s $19.9 billion NASA budget outline released Monday would continue development of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule and begin the deployment of a mini-space station around the moon as soon as 2022, but the proposal would cancel WFIRST, a flagship-class astronomy mission planned for launch in the mid-2020s.

The launch next year of a commercial communications craft jointly managed by London-based Inmarsat and the Greek satellite operator Hellas-Sat has been switched from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket, officials said Thursday.