Live coverage: 400th Proton rocket takes off with Russian satellite

A Russian Soyuz launcher fired into orbit from the remote steppe of Kazakhstan Thursday with 34 satellites built on Florida’s Space Coast, commencing a sequence of launches to deploy a network of nearly 650 spacecraft for a global broadband network owned by OneWeb.

The first six broadband satellites for OneWeb, which envisions a constellation of hundreds of orbiting relay stations beaming Internet signals down to Earth, lifted off Wednesday aboard a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. Launch occurred at 2137 GMT (4:37 p.m. EST).

Rocket Lab’s second Electron booster lifted off from New Zealand’s North Island on Saturday, U.S. time, and reached orbit after an eight-minute climb over the Pacific Ocean. Liftoff with three commercial CubeSats occurred at 8:43 p.m. EST Saturday (0143 GMT; 2:43 p.m. New Zealand time Sunday).