Live coverage: SpaceX launches satellites for OneWeb and Iridium

Russia’s Proton rocket took off on its first launch of the year Sunday with a commercial satellite to expand Inmarsat’s next-generation mobile communications network. Liftoff occurred at 1231 GMT (7:31 a.m. EST), and it took more than 15 hours to place the Inmarsat spacecraft in the correct orbit.

A Soyuz booster is set for launch from French Guiana Sunday night with a European-built military reconnaissance satellite for the United Arab Emirates, the twin of a UAE surveillance craft lost in a rocket failure last year.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo freighter departed the International Space Station Wednesday after delivering more than 7,800 pounds of equipment and experiments, heading for an extended mission with payloads to study fire behavior in microgravity and test a next-generation radio system.