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Calling for ramping up collaboration in space exploration, including on long-duration human spaceflight missions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump hailed 2025 as a pioneering year for US-India civil space cooperation. The two leaders, who also launched INDUS Innovation bridge, held wide-ranging talks on Thursday (Friday IST) focussing on broadening the bilateral partnership, including in the fields of defence, energy, space and critical technology. Modi and Trump called for more collaboration in space exploration, including on long-duration human spaceflight missions, spaceflight safety and sharing of expertise and professional exchanges in emerging areas, including planetary protection, according to a joint statement issued after the discussions. The leaders committed to further commercial space collaboration through industry engagements in conventional and emerging areas, such as connectivity, advanced spaceflight, satellite and space launch systems, space .
NASA's two stuck astronauts may come back to Earth a little sooner than planned. The space agency announced Tuesday that SpaceX will switch capsules for upcoming astronaut flights in order to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home in mid-March instead of late March or April. That will shave at least a couple weeks off their prolonged stay at the International Space Station, which hit the eight-month mark last week. Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges, NASA's commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said in a statement. The test pilots should have returned in June on Boeing's Starliner capsule after what should have been a weeklong flight demo. But the capsule had so much trouble getting to the space station that NASA decided to bring it back empty and reassigned the pair to SpaceX. Then SpaceX delayed the launch of their replacements on a brand new capsule that needed more prepping, which added more time to Wilmore and Williams' mission. With even more work s
Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams has broken the record for total spacewalking time by a woman by logging 62 hours and 6 minutes of spacewalk. Williams and her colleague Butch Wilmore, who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) since June 2024, conducted a spacewalk on Thursday. The duo ventured outside the ISS to remove degraded radio communications hardware and collect samples that may show whether microorganisms exist on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory. The spacewalk began at 7:43 am Eastern Time (ET) and concluded at 1:09 pm ET, lasting 5 hours and 26 minutes. It was the ninth spacewalk for Williams and the fifth for Wilmore. "NASA astronaut Suni WIlliams just surpassed former astronaut Peggy Whitson's total spacewalking time of 60 hours and 21 minutes," NASA said in a post on X. She surpassed Whitson's record for total spacewalking time by a female astronaut. Williams now has 62 hours and 6 minutes of total spacewalk time, fourth on NASA's