STS-135: The final space shuttle landing

Boeing’s first Starliner crew capsule to fly in space departed its factory Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a trip to a launch pad a few miles away, where teams raised the craft atop an Atlas 5 rocket for liftoff next month on an unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the Es’hail 2 communications satellite into orbit around 32 minutes later.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off for its sixth flight of the year Monday from launch pad 39A in Florida, lofting an Inmarsat mobile broadband communications satellite to an orbit more than 40,000 miles above Earth.