Photos: Falcon 9 breaks apart en route to ISS

Two veteran NASA astronauts rocketed away from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday to begin a test flight of a new commercial spaceship designed, built and owned by SpaceX.

Days after launching astronauts for the first time, SpaceX is set to resume a speedy cadence of satellite launches Wednesday night with liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s next batch of Starlink broadband relay stations.

Nine Merlin engines at the base of SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 rocket fired up Tuesday on a launch pad in Florida, wringing out the booster and ground systems ahead of a planned liftoff Sunday with a top secret payload for the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency.