Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

NASA and Northrop Grumman are expected to base the launch of an air-dropped Pegasus rocket with a NASA science satellite from Cape Canaveral later this year, after originally trying to get the mission into space from a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket thundered into the sky over Florida’s Space Coast Sunday night and deployed a sophisticated internet satellite for Viasat into a circular orbit more than 20,000 miles over the equator, delivering for a competitor to SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband network.

SpaceX hurled a secret cargo into space for the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency Saturday, the 30th rocket launch to fly into Earth orbit from pads on Florida’s Space Coast in 2020. The Falcon 9 flight broke an annual record for missions to reach orbit from the Florida spaceport that stood for 54 years.