Q&A with Dan Hart, president and CEO of Virgin Orbit (members only)

An Ariane 5 rocket will fire into the sky from French Guiana Thursday evening and deliver a record heavyweight payload to orbit less than an hour later.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft rolled out to pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Friday. Hydraulics raised the 215-foot-tall rocket vertical on the historic launch pad in preparation for liftoff with four astronauts heading for the International Space Station.

A reusable suborbital spaceplane the size of a business jet being developed by Boeing and the Defense Department’s research and development arm could be launching and landing at Cape Canaveral in 2020, officials said after the defense contractor won a competition last month to design and test the vehicle.