Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

Take a look back on the liftoff of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on its first orbital test flight Dec. 20 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket with these photos showing the capsule streaking into space at dawn.

Rising into a midnight sky lit by the full moon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral early Monday with a commercial cargo craft on the way to the International Space Station, then returned to Florida’s Space Coast for a dramatic nighttime landing.

The Antares rocket, Orbital ATK’s medium-class booster now with modern RD-181 engines, launches at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT) from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia.