CAPE CANAVERAL: SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA on Wednesday, less than two days after completing a flight chartered by millionaires.
It’s the first NASA crew comprised equally of men and women, including the first Black woman making a long-term spaceflight, Jessica Watkins.
“This is one of the most diversified, I think, crews that we’ve had in a really, really long time,” NASA’s space operations mission chief Kathy Lueders said on the eve of launch.
The astronauts were due to arrive at the space station Wednesday night, 16 hours after their predawn liftoff from Kennedy Space Center. They will spend five months at the orbiting lab.
SpaceX has now launched five crews for NASA and two private trips in just under two years. Elon Musk’s company is having an especially busy few weeks: It just finished taking three businessmen to and from the space station as NASA’s first private guests.
A week after the new crew arrives, the three Americans and German they’re replacing will return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule. Three Russians also live at the space station.
Both SpaceX and NASA officials stressed they’re taking it one step at a time to ensure safety. The private mission that concluded Monday encountered no major problems, they said, although high wind delayed the splashdown for a week.
The SpaceX capsules are fully automated — which opens the space gates to a broader clientele — and they’re designed to accommodate a wider range of body sizes. At the same time, NASA and the European Space Agency have been pushing for more female astronauts.
While two Black women visited the space station during the shuttle era, neither moved in for a lengthy stay. Watkins, a geologist who is on NASA’s short list for a moon-landing mission in the years ahead, sees her mission as “an important milestone, I think, both for the agency and for the country.”
She credits supportive family and mentors — including Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space in 1992 — for “ultimately being able to live my dream.”
Like Watkins, NASA astronaut and test pilot Bob Hines is making his first spaceflight. It’s the second visit for the European Space Agency’s lone female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, a former Italian Air Force fighter pilot, and NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, a physician.
The just-completed private flight was NASA’s first dip into space tourism after years of opposition. The space agency said the three people who paid $55 million each to visit the space station blended in while doing experiments and educational outreach. They were accompanied by a former NASA astronaut employed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which arranged the flight.
“The International Space Station is not a vacation spot. It’s not an amusement park. It is an international laboratory, and they absolutely understood and respected that purpose,” said NASA flight director Zeb Scoville.
NASA also hired Boeing to ferry astronauts after retiring the shuttles. The company will take another shot next month at getting an empty crew capsule to the space station, after software and other problems fouled a 2019 test flight and prevented a redo last summer.
SpaceX launches 4 astronauts for NASA after private flight
https://arab.news/4hw3k
SpaceX launches 4 astronauts for NASA after private flight
- They will spend five months at the orbiting lab
- Both SpaceX and NASA officials stressed they’re taking it one step at a time to ensure safety
Islamist militants show ‘unprecedented coordination’ in Burkina Faso attacks
- The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare
- The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas
DAKAR: Islamist militants have killed dozens of soldiers and civilians and overrun an army detachment over the past week in coordinated attacks across multiple regions of Burkina Faso, according to internal reports by two diplomatic missions reviewed by Reuters.
The operations by Al Qaeda–linked Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin show the JNIM is increasingly able to mobilize across large swathes of territory at one time, said the reports, which described a list of locations and places that came under assault.
Burkina Faso’s military rulers seized power in a coup in 2022, promising to improve security. But militants’ attacks have increased in the West African country as state forces battle an insurgency that has spread across the Sahel from Mali.
The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare, the diplomatic reports said. One also described an assault in the eastern city of Fada N’Gourma and flagged another in the northern Ouahigouya area.
“These attacks, which were almost simultaneous and spread across several provinces, demonstrate unprecedented coordination between militants and the junta’s inability to contain the assaults,” said one of the internal reports, which put the death toll at more than 180.
The other gave no toll but said the incidents appeared coordinated and involved several hundred militants serving JNIM and possibly Daesh affiliates.
The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas, it said.
JNIM has said it killed scores of troops from the Burkinabe army in attacks in the past week, US-based SITE Intelligence Group said on Monday.
Burkina authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the assaults or casualty reports.
INJURED GHANAIANS RETURN HOME
In the northern town of Titao, militants attacked an army base and set a market on fire, the internal reports said.
Nearly 80 soldiers and pro-government militia members were killed, one said. The other said about 10 civilians were killed there.
The dead civilians included eight tomato traders, Ghana’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
SITE quoted a media unit for JNIM as saying the insurgents had seized military vehicles, guns and other possessions in the assaults. More than a decade of insurgencies in the Sahel has displaced millions and engendered economic collapse, with violence pushing further south toward West Africa’s coast.
JNIM claimed nearly 500 attacks in Burkina Faso in 2025 and nearly 300 in Mali, SITE’s director, Rita Katz, said in a social media post on LinkedIn.
