At 11 PM local time on April 30, the desert outside Baikonur lit up with a rocket that had been promised since 2017, postponed from 2022, and quietly rebranded twice along the way. The Soyuz 5 finally flew. Roscosmos calls it the spiritual successor to the original Soyuz family. Kazakhstan, which leases the launch site to Russia until 2050, calls it Sunkar, which means falcon. Everyone else just wants to know if it actually works without spilling fuel into the steppe. Spoiler: it worked. A dummy payload reached its calculated suborbital trajectory, both stages performed as intended, and the mock satellite splashed down in a designated zone of the Pacific. By rocket-debut standards, that is a clean sheet. By the standards of Russia’s last decade in heavy launch, where Angara took 27 years to fly and the Zenit assembly line collapsed when relations with Ukraine broke down in 2022, it is borderline miraculous.…