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The first astronauts arrived at China’s new space station on Thursday in the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power.

The trio blasted off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert, and their craft docked at the Tiangong station around seven hours later, where they will spend the next three months.

State broadcaster CCTV showed a live feed from inside the spacecraft during the journey, with the three astronauts lifting their helmet visors after it reached orbit as one smiled and waved at the camera.

Another floated a pen just off his lap in zero-gravity as he browsed the flight manual.

Around seven hours after lift-off, space officials confirmed that the craft had docked with Tianhe, the core module of the country’s new space station.

The Shenzhou-12 craft has “successfully docked with the forward port of the core module” of the Tiangong station, said the China Manned Space Agency, as state TV showed live footage.

At a ceremony before blast-off, the three astronauts, already wearing their space suits, greeted a crowd of supporters and space workers, who sang the patriotic song “Without the Chinese Communist Party, there would be no new China”.

The mission’s commander is Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who has already participated in two space missions.

The two other members are also members of the military.

Space life
The Tianhe module of the space station has separate living spaces for each of the astronauts, a “space treadmill” and bike for exercise, and a communication centre for emails and video calls with ground control.

It is China’s first crewed mission in nearly five years.

Huang Weifen of the China Manned Space Program said the astronauts will perform two spacewalks during the mission, both lasting around six or seven hours.

She also said the trio will wear newly-developed spacewalk suits.

The launch represents a matter of huge prestige in China, as Beijing prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1 with a massive propaganda campaign.

To prepare for the mission, the crew underwent more than 6,000 hours of training, including hundreds of underwater somersaults in full space gear.

The Chinese space agency is planning a total of 11 launches through to the end of next year, including three more manned missions that will deliver two lab modules to expand the 70-tonne station, along with supplies and crew members.

China’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe, and Japan.

It is due for retirement after 2024, even though NASA has said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

Tiangong will be much smaller than the ISS, and is expected to have a lifespan of at least 10 years.

China has said it would be open to international collaboration on its space station although it has yet to give specific details.

Zhou Jianping, chief designer for the space programme, said “foreign astronauts are certainly going to enter the Chinese space station one day”.

“There are a number of countries that have expressed a desire to do that and we will be open to that in future,” he said.

Beijing said in March it was also planning to build a separate lunar space station with Russia, and this week the two countries issued a “roadmap” for potential collaboration opportunities.
 


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Gemini North Telescope Spots Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Racing Through Solar System

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Gemini North Telescope Spots Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Racing Through Solar System

A rare interstellar object has been spotted in our solar system, making it the second known object to cross over from outside our cosmic neighbourhood and arrive near our planet. 3I/ATLAS is seen here while about 290 million miles (465 million kilometres) from Earth, when it was journeying inbound on its trip to our vicinity of the solar system. This icy wanderer, first detected by the ATLAS survey on July 1, marks just the third known object from beyond our solar system to be identified, following in the cosmic footsteps of 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

Massive Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Offers Rare Glimpse Into Alien Planetary System Origins

As per a statement from the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, which oversees the International Gemini Observatory, 3I/ATLAS offers a valuable chance to study the building blocks of alien planetary systems. “The sensitivity and scheduling agility of the International Gemini Observatory has provided critical early characterisation of this interstellar wanderer,” mentioned NSF program director Martin Still. At an estimated 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS is much larger than its predecessors, making it easier to analyse.

Images show the comet with a bright, compact coma — the envelope of dust and gas surrounding its core — and other data suggest it could be older than our own solar system. Believed to have originated from the Milky Way’s outer thick disk, 3I/ATLAS may hold clues to the conditions in far-off star systems that once harboured it. Though the discovery is thrilling to some, the comet poses no threat to the Earth as it makes its fleeting visit.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is expected to make its closest pass by the Sun on Oct. 30, when it will fly 130 million miles inside the orbit of Mars. It comes closest to Earth in December, when it is 170 million miles away. Because of its odd orbit, it’s never coming back.

Astronomers around the world are turning toward a piece of an interstellar comet that broke off using a telescope too distant to study, by necessity, as a rare chance to probe the nature of an object from another star and its solar system of origin.

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NASA Grounds Boeing Starliner Until 2026 After Test Flight Failures

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NASA Grounds Boeing Starliner Until 2026 After Test Flight Failures

The Boeing CST-100 Starliner, a crew capsule for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has been plagued by persistent problems. Its first crewed test flight in June 2024 was cut short by technical failures, including helium pressurization leaks and multiple thruster malfunctions. NASA ultimately elected to return Starliner to Earth without its crew, keeping the astronauts aboard the station for safety. With those problems unresolved, NASA now says the capsule will remain grounded until around 2026, and its next mission will likely be uncrewed.

Technical Setbacks and Grounding

According to NASA, During its June 2024 Crew Flight Test, Starliner suffered serious propulsion issues. Multiple helium leaks were detected in the service module’s pressurization system, and five of the capsule’s 28 fine-control thrusters failed during approach to the ISS. NASA and Boeing extended the crew’s station stay while engineers traced the problems to thermal and seal failures in the thruster “doghouse” enclosures.

Ultimately NASA decided to bring Starliner back to Earth empty, concluding the test without its astronauts aboard. Boeing and NASA have since conducted extensive ground testing to validate fixes: engineers at NASA’s White Sands facility are firing thrusters in varied sequences to refine thermal models, and Boeing has added new insulation shunts and thermal barriers in the thruster housings to prevent overheating.

Future of the Starliner Program

Boeing’s delays have reshaped NASA’s Commercial Crew plans. NASA officials say Starliner may even fly one more uncrewed test before carrying astronauts. Starliner development is now billions over budget: its original $4.2 billion contract has grown by roughly $2 billion in extra costs. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has flown 11 ISS crew missions and its NASA contract has climbed toward $5 billion amid extra flights added while Starliner lagged. NASA still views Starliner as a critical backup to Dragon and aims to certify it for crew rotations by late 2025 or early 2026.

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Quantum Leap: Scientists Achieve Magic State Distillation on Logical Qubits for the First Time

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Quantum Leap: Scientists Achieve Magic State Distillation on Logical Qubits for the First Time

Scientists have shown the elusive phenomenon of quantum computing that could create the way for fault-tolerant machines, which are much powerful than any of the supercomputers. Magic state distillation is the process which was proposed 20 years ago; however, the use of logical qubits has puzzled scientists since then. It has long been considered crucial for making high-quality resources, called magic states, required to complete the quantum computer’s potential. It has been possible on plains, till now, by which the high-quality magic states are purified so that the complex algorithms can use them. It has not been possible on the logical qubits.

According to Science Daily, the groups of physical qubits sharing the same data are configured for detecting and correcting the errors which frequently disturb the quantum computing operations. However, the scientists with QuEra said that they have demonstrated magic state distillation for the first time on logical qubits. The findings were published on July 14, 2025, in the journal Nature.

Path to Fault-tolerant Quantum Computing

Quantum computers would not be fulfilling their promise without this process. They use qubits as their building blocks and make use of quantum logic, the set of rules and operations that control how quantum information is processed for running the algorithms and processing data. It is challenging to run the complex algorithms together with maintaining amazingly low error rates.

Physical qubits are noisy, which implies that the calculations are often disrupted by factors such as temperature fluctuations and electromagnetic radiation. This is the reason why so much research has taken place on Quantum Error Correction.

With the distillation process, the faithfulness of the magic state increased for any input. This shows that the fault-tolerant magic state distillation has worked in practice. Further, it implies that the quantum computer uses both logical qubits and magic states of higher quality for running non-Clifford gates.

Scientists say that the shift has been observed for a few years. It was challenging to make the quantum computers, with the detection and correction of errors. However, the scientists have successfully done it.

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