Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

Members of NASA’s independent panel of aerospace safety advisors raised concerns last week about quality control problems that “seemingly have plagued” Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule program, while urging NASA to closely monitor SpaceX’s plans to reuse Crew Dragon spaceships on astronaut flights to the International Space Station.

The next Delta 4-Heavy rocket was raised vertical Friday at Cape Canaveral, signaling the start of a comprehensive series of pre-flight tests before liftoff next year with a top secret U.S. government spy satellite.

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.