China keen on stable Australia ties despite tensions
China on Monday sought to keep ties with Australia on an even keel despite tensions over military encounters in the South China Sea this year and broa...
Peggy Whitson, NASA retiree turned private astronaut, headed for splashdown in the Pacific on Tuesday after her fifth trip to the International Space Station, joined by crewmates from India, Poland, and Hungary returning from their countries’ first ISS mission.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon began its 22-hour journey back to Earth on Monday, 18 days after docking with the space station. If all goes smoothly, it will parachute into the Pacific near California at 2:30 a.m. PDT (09:30 GMT) after re-entering the atmosphere.
The return flight concludes the fourth ISS mission organised by Texas-based start-up Axiom Space in collaboration with Elon Musk's California-headquartered private rocket venture SpaceX.
The Axiom-4 mission was led by 65-year-old Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who was the agency’s first female chief and the first woman to command the ISS.
Now Axiom’s director of human spaceflight, Whitson had already spent 675 days in space—a U.S. record—across three NASA missions and a 2023 Axiom-2 flight. Her Axiom-4 mission adds about three more weeks to that total.
Joining her on Axiom-4 were Shubhanshu Shukla (39) from India, Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski (41) from Poland, and Tibor Kapu (33) from Hungary.
The crew is bringing back science samples from over 60 microgravity experiments, which will be sent to researchers on Earth for analysis.
For India, Poland, and Hungary, this mission marked their first human spaceflights in over 40 years—and their first ever to the ISS through national space programmes.
Shukla, an Indian Air Force pilot, is seen as a step towards India’s first crewed Gaganyaan mission, planned for 2027.
Uznanski-Wisniewski represents Poland through the European Space Agency, while Kapu flew under Hungary’s HUNOR programme—though he’s not the first person of Hungarian descent to visit the space station.
Hungarian-born billionaire Charles Simonyi, now a U.S. citizen, visited the ISS twice as a space tourist in 2007 and 2009, travelling aboard Russian Soyuz capsules. Unlike government-sponsored astronauts, however, his trips were privately funded and not part of any official national mission.
Nicknamed "Grace" by its crew, the capsule launched on June 25 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, debuting as the fifth spacecraft in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon fleet.
Axiom-4 is also SpaceX’s 18th crewed mission since 2020, when the company began flying U.S. astronauts from American soil for the first time since the space shuttle programme ended.
For Axiom—a nine-year-old company co-founded by a former NASA ISS programme manager—the mission expands its business of sending astronauts backed by private firms and foreign governments into low-Earth orbit.
Axiom is also one of the few companies developing a commercial space station of its own, intended to eventually replace the ISS, which NASA expects to retire around 2030.
At least 69 people have died and almost 150 injured following a powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Cebu City in the central Visayas region of the Philippines, officials said, making it one of the country’s deadliest disasters this year.
A tsunami threat was issued in Chile after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the Drake Passage on Friday. The epicenter was located 135 miles south of Puerto Williams on the north coast of Navarino Island.
The war in Ukraine has reached a strategic impasse, and it seems that the conflict will not be solved by military means. This creates a path toward one of two alternatives: either a “frozen” phase that can last indefinitely or a quest for a durable political regulation.
A shooting in Nice, southeastern France, left two people dead and five injured on Friday, authorities said.
Snapchat will start charging users who store more than 5GB of photos and videos in its Memories feature, prompting backlash from long-time users.
Nokia chief executive Justin Hotard said artificial intelligence is fuelling a structural growth cycle similar to the internet expansion of the 1990s, but rejected fears that investor enthusiasm has reached unsustainable levels.
NASA has announced that it will reopen bidding for its flagship U.S. moon landing contract, citing mounting delays in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship lunar lander project.
China has accused the United States of stealing sensitive data and infiltrating its National Time Service Centre, warning that such breaches could have disrupted communications, financial systems, power supplies, and the international standard time network.
Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba-backed Ant Group (688688.SS) and e-commerce company JD.com have halted plans to issue stablecoins in Hong Kong after the government raised concerns about the increasing influence of privately controlled currencies, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.
Apple has pledged to increase its investment in China despite ongoing tensions between Washington and Beijing, CEO Tim Cook said during a meeting with China’s industry minister.
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