Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

The final flight of Space Shuttle Discovery seen from the ET-Cam mounted near the top of its fuel tank. Mission STS-133 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on February 24, 2011. (Membership required)

In the first memorial of its kind, NASA and the families of the 14 men and women who lost their lives aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 have joined together to remember the astronauts with pictures, personal mementos and, in an emotional first, iconic wreckage from both orbiters.

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.