Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle, an unpiloted orbiting military laboratory. Liftoff occurred at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), and the Falcon 9’s first stage booster successfully landed at Cape Canaveral a few minutes later.

SpaceX has moved up its next launch to Wednesday, one day earlier than previously planned. A Falcon 9 rocket will take off with the next 60 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband Internet network at 3:37 p.m. EDT (1937 GMT) Wednesday from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There’s a 90 percent chance of favorable weather for launch Wednesday.

The pace of the European Space Agency’s development of a power and propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew capsule will likely determine when an unpiloted test flight of the spaceship and its heavy-lift rocket will take off, NASA officials said last week.