Photos: Falcon takes flight

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that carried four astronauts to the International Space Station in November broke the record Sunday for the longest spaceflight by a U.S. crew vehicle, surpassing the 84-day mark set by an Apollo capsule on the final flight to the Skylab space station in 1974.

Boeing and NASA officials said Thursday the first launch of astronauts on Boeing’s delay-prone Starliner crew capsule won’t happen in July after engineers recently discovered a problem with the spacecraft’s parachute system and identified flammable tape around wiring harnesses inside the vehicle.

SpaceX managed to thread the needle with the weather and launch the first of two planned Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral in 48 hours. A Falcon 9 rocket launched from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday at 11:09 p.m. EDT (0309 UTC on Sunday). It will be followed by another Falcon 9 from nearby pad 40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday.