Photos: Most powerful Atlas 5 puts 15,000-pound satellite in orbit

A commercial communications satellite will blast off Thursday from French Guiana on top of a Soyuz rocket, on the way to a station over the Americas to supply bandwidth to airline travelers and broadcasters in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

A brief test-firing of a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday morning kept SpaceX on track for a launch Saturday night from Cape Canaveral with a communications satellite to be jointly used by Telesat and APT Satellite of Hong Kong.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral with the Deep Space Climate Observatory, beginning a new day in space weather forecasting. Liftoff occurred at 6:03:32 p.m. EST on Feb. 11.