Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

The tugboat and barge transporting the last space shuttle external tank to its display venue in California have reached the inlet to the Panama Canal, now just days away from sailing into the Pacific.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off for its sixth flight of the year Monday from launch pad 39A in Florida, lofting an Inmarsat mobile broadband communications satellite to an orbit more than 40,000 miles above Earth.

A month after an X-37B mini-space shuttle glided to a landing on Kennedy Space Center’s runway in Florida, the U.S. Air Force announced Tuesday that the spaceplane’s next mission will launch in August aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the first time.