Q&A with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO

On its first nighttime launch, Rocket Lab’s Electron booster climbed into orbit Sunday from New Zealand with a trio of small U.S. military payloads, demonstrating the privately-developed rocket’s ability to help meet the Air Force’s growing demand for smallsat launches.

NASA expects to spend some $5 billion underwriting development of commercial spacecraft built by Boeing and SpaceX to carry astronauts to and from the space station, ending reliance on the Russians for crew flights and lowering the average cost per seat to around $58 million.

Boeing officials said Monday the company’s Starliner crew capsule will fly a second time without astronauts after software problems and other issues plagued a first test flight in December, preventing the ship from reaching the International Space Station.