Q&A with Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium (members only)

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.

After an 11-day delay, SpaceX planned to deploy 60 more Starlink broadband satellites with a Falcon 9 rocket launch scheduled for 10:22 a.m. EDT (1422 GMT) Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But SpaceX scrubbed the launch less than a minute before liftoff due to bad weather.

NASA is sending into orbit Monday night a spacecraft to test a safer type of rocket fuel, an ultra-precise atomic clock that could change the way missions navigate in deep space, and an experiment to examine the resiliency of electronics to radiation.