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 may overlap for a number of days with the three-member crew already onboard and broaden the power to its most measurement.

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 service 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 development phase, based on 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 take care of 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 measurement, with three modules and three spacecraft hooked up for a total mass of practically 100 tons.

Tiangong can accommodate six astronauts at a time and the handover will take a few 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 often 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 may 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Whereas China’s crewed space program is formally three many years outdated this yr, it actually acquired underway in 2003, when China grew to become solely the third nation after the U.S. and Russia to place a human into space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 exterior 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 businesses.

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 Seventies, and one other Chinese language rover is looking for 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 disregarded complaints that it has allowed rocket levels to fall to Earth uncontrolled after NASA accused it of “failing to fulfill accountable requirements concerning their space debris.” In that case, components of a Chinese language rocket landed within the Indian Ocean.

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

© 2022 The Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials is probably not printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.