Outer space

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company blasted its third private crew into space on Dec. 11 and brought it back safely, this time including the daughter of the first American astronaut.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who blasts off for the International Space Station this week, is an irreverent space enthusiast who has made headlines for splashing the cash on modern art.

The 46-year-old tycoon is the founder of Japan's largest online fashion mall and is the country's 30th-richest person, according to business magazine Forbes.

Turkey will launch its Turksat 5B communications satellite into orbit next month, a senior official said on Nov. 24.

"One of the prominent features of Turksat 5B, which will be launched into an orbital slot at 42 degrees East, is to increase Turkey's Ka-band data communication capacity 15-fold," Transport and Infrastructure Minister Adil Karaismailoğlu said in a statement.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin on Oct. 25 announced it wants to launch a space station that will house up to 10 people in the second half of the decade, as the race to commercialize the cosmos heats up.

The Russian actress and the Russian director, who stayed aboard the International Space Station for 12 days to shoot the first film in space, returned safely to Earth, world agencies reported.

The state commission has approved the crew of the Soyuz MS-19 manned spacecraft, which will be launched into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Tuesday, the Roscosmos press service told TASS.

A rover team of a Turkish university won a grand prize at the biggest European competition focused on space and robotics, reaching the first and second ranks in different categories.

The rover team of Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ) has returned from Poland with two prizes in hand from the European Rover Challenge held in the country's Kielce town.

Four space tourists safely ended their trailblazing trip to orbit on Sept. 18 with a splashdown in the Atlantic off the Florida coast.

Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their chartered flight began three days earlier.

The all-amateur crew was the first to circle the world without a professional astronaut.

Turkey's first indigenous communications satellite Turksat 6A, which is planned to be completed in 2022, will be launched by the U.S.-based space firm SpaceX.

Chinese astronauts edged into space on Aug. 19 to add the finishing touches to a robotic arm on the Tiangong space station.

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The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China's heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.