Live coverage: Ten Iridium satellites successfully deployed by Falcon 9 rocket

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.

The White House’s $19.9 billion NASA budget outline released Monday would continue development of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule and begin the deployment of a mini-space station around the moon as soon as 2022, but the proposal would cancel WFIRST, a flagship-class astronomy mission planned for launch in the mid-2020s.

SpaceX launched a series of 81 payloads to a Sun-synchronous Earth orbit over a roughly 2.5-hour-long deployment period. Liftoff from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base happened at 12:12 a.m. PDT (0312 EDT / 0712 UTC).