Live coverage: Space station crew safely returns to Earth

Watch a replay of the Falcon 9 rocket’s liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as seen from the Kennedy Space Center press site roughly 4 miles away.

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.

With a robot rather than a cosmonaut in the commander’s seat, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft rocketed into orbit from Kazakhstan late Wednesday (U.S. time) en route to the International Space Station on a critical test flight before crews begin riding an upgraded Soyuz booster next year.