Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

Cocooned inside the nose cone of its Falcon 9 rocket booster, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane journeyed from a former space shuttle hangar at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, past the Vehicle Assembly Building and toward launch pad 39A last week ahead of liftoff Thursday.

Follow the key events of the Falcon 9 rocket’s ascent to orbit with 60 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.

A little more than a year after the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first test flight, SpaceX teams on Florida’s Space Coast are readying the world’s most powerful operational launcher for its second mission Thursday with a commercial communications satellite.