Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

A day after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken docked with the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) Sunday to complete a 19-hour transit on the new commercial crew capsule.

A little more than a year after the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first test flight, SpaceX teams on Florida’s Space Coast are readying the world’s most powerful operational launcher for its second mission Thursday with a commercial communications satellite.

The world’s most powerful operational rocket flashed to life at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) Tuesday and climbed into a moonlit summer sky from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the same site where the Apollo 11 astronauts left Earth for their historic moon landing nearly 50 years ago.