Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

The first 34 satellites manufactured on a new commercial spacecraft assembly line just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are scheduled for liftoff on a Soyuz rocket Thursday halfway around the world in Kazakhstan, kicking off a sequence of up to 20 launches from three countries to deploy nearly 650 satellites for OneWeb’s global Internet network.

The last in an older generation of spin-stabilized Chinese weather satellites launched Tuesday toward a perch more than 22,000 miles over the equator, the start of a mission of at least four years monitoring tropical cyclones and other weather systems across Africa and Asia.

Even though it doesn’t obey any earthly speed limit and has a space-suited mannequin for a driver, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster won’t drive up his insurance rates anytime soon. Researchers say the sports car won’t have a really close encounter with Earth until 2091 and could last millions of years before getting totaled in a planetary crackup.