Video: SpaceX Dragon departs space station

A robotic U.S. military spaceplane surpassed 719 days in orbit Monday, setting a new record for the longest flight of the Air Force’s winged X-37B orbiting experiment platform nearly two years after launching from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX flew 18 payloads to a mid-inclination orbit including an intelligence-gathering satellite for the military of South Korea. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509 UTC).

SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a previously-flown first stage booster carrying the SES 12 communications satellite, an all-electric, multi-band video and data relay platform to serve the Asia-Pacific region. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral occurred at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT), and SpaceX did not plan to recover the first stage.