STS-135: The final shuttle launch

Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab teams are gearing up for their first missions of the year in the coming days, with Virgin’s air-launched rocket set for its second demonstration flight and Rocket Lab’s Electron booster poised to launch a small German-owned communications satellite.

An unpiloted Russian Soyuz spacecraft, with a humanoid robot in the commander’s seat instead of a cosmonaut, is scheduled for liftoff late Wednesday (U.S. time) from Kazakhstan on a test flight to verify the spaceship’s compatibility with the new-generation Soyuz-2.1a rocket set to begin launching crews to the International Space Station next year.

A break in thunderstorms streaming across Central Florida allowed a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule to blast off Thursday from Cape Canaveral in pursuit of the International Space Station with a new docking mechanism, a spacesuit and 40 mice acting as high-flying research specimens.