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Soyuz MS-18 Rocket Honours 60th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s Space Travel
“There is contact!” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos wrote on Twitter.
“Hey, Expedition 64 – set the dinner table… Can’t wait to join you on @Space_Station in a few hours!” Vande Hei tweeted to the crew on board the ISS hours before blast-off.
The launch came just ahead of Monday’s anniversary of Gagarin’s historic flight on April 12, 1961.
Reminders of his achievement were everywhere at the Russia-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as Novitsky, Dubrov and Vande Hei prepared for their half-year mission aboard the orbital lab.
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft that the trio took off in has been named after the legendary cosmonaut and Gagarin’s portrait has been added to its exterior.
Gagarin also came up more than once in the traditional pre-flight press conference on Thursday, where the crew was asked how they planned to mark the anniversary once in space.
“We’ll celebrate it together,” said 43-year-old Dubrov, who is flying to space for the first time. “And we’ll work hard!”
Friday’s blast-off was from a different launchpad than the one used for Gagarin’s one and only mission, which saw him spend 108 minutes in orbit.
Tough times
Last used in 2019, the Gagarin launchpad is undergoing upgrades in preparation for a new generation of Soyuz rockets and expected to return to action in 2023.
Gagarin’s mission was a propaganda coup for the Soviet Union and a huge win in the space race with the West, which became one of the Cold War’s most exciting subplots.
But the anniversary comes at a difficult time for Russia’s space industry, which has suffered a number of setbacks recently, from industry corruption scandals to an aborted take-off scuppering a manned mission in 2018.
Perhaps most importantly, Roscosmos and Baikonur last year lost their monopoly over manned ISS launches, as reusable rockets from Elon Musk’s Space X delivered NASA astronauts to the station from American soil.
The emergence of commercial competitors has left Roscosmos with a financial headache – NASA has paid the company tens of millions of dollars per seat for astronauts sent to the ISS.
Russian space officials still talk up new ventures, including bringing back samples from Venus and creating a rocket capable of making 100 round trips to space.
Yet the space budget has fallen year by year as President Vladimir Putin prioritises increased military spending.
Crowded space station
Space has proven a rare area of cooperation between Russia and the West amid rising geopolitical tensions.
But the ISS project, which began in 2000, is expected to be retired before the end of this decade.
Despite talk of NASA and Roscosmos heading in different directions as the space station winds down, crews have stressed the importance of good relations for continued progress.
“When we first started we were competing with each other and that was one of the reasons we were so successful at the beginning of human space flight,” said Vande Hei, who poked fun at the haircut he gave himself during quarantine ahead of his second mission aboard the ISS.
“As time went on we realised we could achieve a bit more working together… I hope that will continue into the future.”
The ISS, which is typically home to six people at a time, is set to be fairly crowded for the next week, with seven astronauts and cosmonauts on board before the trio arrived.
NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov, and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov are set to return from the space station on April 17.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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