An Ariane 4 is still set to lift off Friday evening Sept. 2 (early Saturday local time) from the Ariane's ELA-2 launching facility at Spaceport Kourou in French Guiana.

But at the request of Korea Telecom, the launch campaign was suspended "for a few days" to allow for additional checks on the Koreasat 3 spacecraft.

The final launch date has not been confirmed pending the satellite makers review, according to Arianespace spokesperson Birgit Zacher. In the meantime, the satellite remains atop its Ariane 4 booster at the pad.

This latest potential delay threatens a tight manifest that calls for five additional Ariane launches between October and December. Included in that mix of vehicle configurations and payloads are a French military satellite, other commercial satellites, and the first commercial Ariane 5 launch, still planned for an early December liftoff carrying the XMM satellite for the European Space Agency.

The most immediate impact of a delay with the Koreasat 3 would be felt on the V-121 launch, which is planned for October. That flight, the next scheduled after the Koreasat mission, is to carry Loral's Telstar 7 communications satellite into orbit.

Arianespace technicians need at least two to three weeks between launches to reconfigure ELA-2 for the next mission. The Ariane 5 boosters are launched from a separate launching complex called ELA-3.