Photos: Falcon 9 breaks apart en route to ISS

An official weather outlook issued by U.S. Air Force meteorologists Thursday calls for partly cloudy skies on Florida’s Space Coast for liftoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just after sunrise Sunday with a clandestine payload for the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies.

A Falcon 9 rocket powered by a recycled first stage lit its main engines for a hold-down firing on a launch pad Tuesday at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in preparation for launch with an Argentine radar satellite on a mission that will feature the first SpaceX booster landing on the West Coast.

The mission, dubbed NROL-77, was the final time SpaceX uses Landing Zone 2 to recover a first stage Falcon booster. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 2:16 p.m. EST (1916 UTC).