Q&A with John Shannon, Boeing’s SLS vice president and program manager (members only)

A Falcon 9 rocket fires its nine Merlin first stage engines at Cape Canaveral’s launch pad 40 Nov. 5, 2019, as part of a routine pre-launch test. The successful static fire clears the way for the launch of 60 Starlink satellites, currently scheduled for Nov. 11.

A Soyuz-2.1b booster loaded with 34 satellites for OneWeb’s global Internet network rolled out of its assembly building Monday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and rode a rail car to its launch pad for final preflight checks before liftoff Thursday.

Veteran astronaut John Grunsfeld, who flew five space shuttle missions before becoming the head of NASA’s science mission directorate in 2012, announced Tuesday he will leave the space agency at the end of April.