Live coverage: Ariane 5 blasts off with two Intelsat satellites

A Soyuz rocket soared into orbit after firing off a launch pad in the Amazon jungle Friday, deploying two satellites nearly 15,000 miles above Earth to expand Europe’s Galileo system helping locate automobiles, airliners, and millions of other users around the world.

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.

A Chinese communications satellite heading for geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator lifted off Thursday from the Xichang space base in southwestern China aboard a Long March 3B rocket on the first space launch of 2019.