Shuttle Atlantis unwrapped ahead of public debut

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.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Monday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the Koreasat 5A communications satellite into orbit around 36 minutes later.

The electric sports car shrouded inside the nose of the first Falcon Heavy rocket may conjure notions of a flight of fancy, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the powerful new launcher awaiting blastoff Tuesday from Florida’s Space Coast has a lot to prove.