Live coverage: Ariane 5 blasts off with two Intelsat satellites

More than six years after back-to-back failures left the Taurus rocket with an uncertain future, a redesigned version of the launcher sporting a new name is set to loft 10 small Earth-imaging satellites into orbit Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Arianespace plans 11 launches from French Guiana this year, including eight flights by the heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket with up to a dozen large telecommunications satellites and four spacecraft for Europe’s Galileo navigation system.

Russian Soyuz commander Alexander Misurkin and two U.S. astronauts — flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba — lifted off Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The trio began their six-hour journey to the International Space Station with a launch aboard a Soyuz rocket at 2117 GMT (5:17 p.m. EDT), and docking occurred at 0255 GMT (10:55 p.m. EDT).