Falcon Heavy hot fire as seen from Kennedy Space Center Press Site

A new communications spacecraft for Hispasat, a Spanish communications satellite operator, will get a boost from a Russian Proton rocket Monday toward an orbital position more than 22,000 miles above Earth.

SpaceX will go for another first Thursday, this time flying a refurbished Dragon supply ship carrying nearly 6,000 pounds of cargo and experiments to the International Space Station nearly three years after its first mission.

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.