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A SpaceX rocket soared into orbit from Florida on Wednesday carrying the next long-term International Space Station crew, with a Russian cosmonaut, two Americans and a Japanese astronaut flying together in a demonstration of US-Russian teamwork in space despite Ukraine war tensions.

A high-ranking official of the Russian space agency Roscosmos said shortly after the launch that the flight marked “a new phase of our cooperation” with the US space agency NASA.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endurance, lifted off into clear skies at noon EDT (9:30pm IST) from NASA‘s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The two-stage, 23-story-tall Falcon 9 ascended from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish-orange fireball.

The mission is notable for the inclusion of Anna Kikina, 38, the lone female cosmonaut on active duty with Roscosmos, making it the first spaceflight with a Russian launched from US soil in two decades. As the spacecraft entered Earth orbit, Kikina radioed her thanks to NASA, Roscosmos and their International Space Station (ISS) partners for “giving us this great opportunity.”

“We’re so glad to do it together,” Kikina said.

Kikina, who had trained in the US for the flight since spring 2021, was essentially swapping places with a NASA astronaut who took her seat aboard a Russian Soyuz flight to the ISS last month under a new ride-sharing deal signed by NASA and Roscosmos in July.

About nine minutes after Wednesday’s launch, the rocket’s upper stage delivered the Crew Dragon into a preliminary orbit as it streaked through space at nearly 16,000 miles per hour (27,000 kph). The reusable lower-stage booster flew itself back to Earth and landed safely on a drone recovery vessel at sea.

The four crew members and their autonomously flying capsule were due to reach the ISS in about 29 hours, on Thursday evening, to begin a 150-day science mission aboard the orbital laboratory some 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.

The mission, designated Crew-5, marks the fifth full-fledged ISS crew NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX vehicle since the private rocket venture founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk began sending US astronauts aloft in May 2020.

‘Smooth ride’

The team was led by Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, who became the first Native American woman sent to orbit by NASA and the first woman to take the commander’s seat of a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Moments after reaching orbit, as mission control wished the crew “Godspeed,” Mann radioed back, “Awesome. Thank you so much to the Falcon team. Whew! That was a smooth ride uphill.”

Mann, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel and combat fighter pilot, is also among the first group of 18 astronauts selected for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions aimed at returning humans to the moon later this decade.

The designated pilot was Mann’s fellow spaceflight rookie Josh Cassada, 49, a U.S. Navy aviator and test pilot with a doctorate in high-energy particle physics. Rounding out the crew from Japan’s space agency JAXA was Koichi Wakata, 59, a robotics expert making his fifth voyage to space.

The team will be welcomed by seven existing ISS occupants – the Crew-4 team consisting of three Americans and an Italian astronaut – as well as two Russians and the NASA astronaut who flew with them to orbit on a Soyuz flight.

The new arrivals are set to conduct more than 200 experiments, many focused on medical research ranging from 3-D “bio-printing” of human tissue to a study of bacteria cultured in microgravity.

ISS, the length of a football field, has been continuously occupied since 2000, operated by a US-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries. It was born in part to improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the Soviet Union’s collapse and the end of Cold War rivalries that spurred the original American-Soviet space race.

NASA-Roscosmos relations have been tested since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and US imposed sweeping sanctions against Moscow.

At a post-launch NASA-SpaceX briefing on Wednesday, Sergei Krikalev, head of human spaceflight for Roscosmos, said he and the agency chief Yuri Borisov were seeking to ease tensions after Borisov’s predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, raised questions about the future of the ISS partnership.

Krikalev cited bilateral teamwork in space dating back to the Apollo-Soyuz era in 1975, saying, “We started our cooperation many years ago, over 40 years ago, and will continue our cooperation as long as I can imagine.”

The July crew-exchange deal paved the way for resuming routine joint US-Russian flights to the ISS that had begun during the space shuttle era and continued after shuttles ceased flying in 2011. From then until SpaceX began offering crewed launch services nine years later, Soyuz was the only avenue to orbit for US astronauts.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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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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