Video: Falcon 9 fires up engines on pad 39A (members only)

A Soyuz rocket took off from a cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East and deployed 36 Florida-built OneWeb internet satellites into orbit Thursday. Another batch of OneWeb satellites will launch next month, continuing the build-out of a planned fleet of 648 spacecraft to provide global broadband services.

A decommissioned launch facility at Cape Canaveral where some of America’s first interplanetary missions left Earth will now be used as a test site for a commercial moon lander.

Five European satellites, including a Italian radar surveillance craft and an ESA exoplanet probe, lifted off Wednesday at 0854 GMT (3:54 a.m. EST) from French Guiana aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. A launch attempt Tuesday was scrubbed due to a software concern with the launch vehicle.