MOSCOW, 19 December, 2020, (TON): Russia successfully launched its Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket on Friday, delivering 36 satellites from the U.K.-based OneWeb Company into space.

The rocket blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the country's Far East at 3:26 p.m. Moscow time (1226 GMT), the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos said in a statement.

The upper stage, which houses the satellites, separated from the third stage of the rocket normally, it said.

"Today's launch will be marked as the first fully commercial one from the Vostochny cosmodrome," Roscosmos noted.

The launch will expand OneWeb’s number of in-orbit satellites to 110, part of a low earth orbit fleet of 648 designed to establish a high-speed, low-latency global connectivity, the satellite operator said.

This was the first launch of OneWeb satellites from the Vostochny spaceport and the first purely commercial launch from this space centre.

The first six OneWeb satellites were launched by a Soyuz-ST carrier rocket from the Kourou space center in French Guiana on February 28, 2019 and put in orbit on the same day. Soyuz is the only orbital rocket that has launched from three different continents and countries.