Chinese spaceship with 3 aboard docks with space station

Three Chinese language astronauts docked early Wednesday with their nation’s space station, the place they’ll overlap for a number of days with the three-member crew already onboard and broaden the ability to its most dimension.

Docking with the Tiangong station got here at 5:42 a.m. Wednesday, about 6 1/2 hours after the Shenzhou-15 spaceship blasted off atop a Lengthy March-2F provider rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite tv for pc Launch Heart.

The six-month mission, commanded by Fei Junlong and crewed by Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu, would be the final within the station’s building phase, in line with the China Manned Area Company. The station’s third and final module docked earlier this month, one of many final steps in China’s effort to keep up a relentless crewed presence in orbit.

The crew of the Shenzhou-15 will spend a number of days working with the present three-member crew of the Tiangong station, who will return to Earth after their six-month mission.

Fei, 57, is a veteran of the 2005 four-day Shenzhou-6 mission, the second time China despatched a human into space. Deng and Zhang are making their first space flights.

The station has now expanded to its most dimension, with three modules and three spacecraft hooked up for a total mass of almost 100 tons.

Tiangong can accommodate six astronauts at a time and the handover will take a couple of week. That marks the station’s first in-orbit crew rotation.

China has not but mentioned what additional work is required to finish the station. Subsequent yr, it plans to launch the Xuntian space telescope, which, whereas not a part of Tiangong, will orbit in sequence with the station and might dock sometimes with it for upkeep.

With out the hooked up spacecraft, the Chinese language station weighs about 66 tons—a fraction of the Worldwide Area Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs round 465 tons.

With a lifespan of 10 to fifteen years, Tiangong might one day be the one space station nonetheless up and working if the Worldwide Area Station retires within the coming years as deliberate.

Whereas China’s crewed space program is formally three a long time outdated this yr, it really bought underway in 2003, when China grew to become solely the third nation after the U.S. and Russia to place a human into space utilizing its personal sources.

This system is run by the ruling Communist Occasion’s navy wing, the Individuals’s Liberation Military, and has proceeded virtually solely with out outdoors assist. The U.S. excluded China from the International Space Station due to its program’s navy ties, though China has engaged in restricted cooperation with different nations’ space companies.

China has additionally chalked up uncrewed mission successes: Its Yutu 2 rover was the primary to discover the little-known far facet of the moon.

China’s Chang’e 5 probe additionally returned lunar rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the primary time for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, and one other Chinese language rover is trying to find proof of life on Mars.

Officers are reporting contemplating an eventual crewed mission to the moon, though no timeline has been provided, at the same time as NASA presses forward with its Artemis lunar exploration program that goals to ship 4 astronauts across the moon in 2024 and land people there as early as 2025.

Whereas continuing easily for probably the most half, China’s space program has additionally drawn controversy. Beijing dismissed complaints that it has allowed rocket levels to fall to Earth uncontrolled after NASA accused it of “failing to satisfy accountable requirements relating to their space debris.” In that case, elements of a Chinese language rocket landed within the Indian Ocean.

China can also be reportedly creating a extremely secret space airplane and its rising space capabilities characteristic within the newest Pentagon protection technique, which mentioned this system was a element of China’s “holistic strategy to joint warfare.”

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