by Three Chinese taikonauts blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Thursday and set off after the Tiangong space station to replace three long-term staff members which is closing out a six-month stay in space.
With a veteran Yes Guangfu43, at the controls of the spacecraft Shenzhou 18, flanked by rookies Li Cong, 34, and Li Guangsu, 36, the roared Long March 2F roared to life at 8:59 am EDT (8:59 pm Beijing time) and gently climbed it exited on a southwesterly path to match the station’s orbit.
Ye and his colleagues then monitored a 6.5-hour automated rendezvous with the Tiangong station and docked at 3:32 a.m. EDT, joining the Shenzhou-17 commander. Tang Hongbo, Tang Shengjie and Jiang Xinlin aboard the orbital outpost.
“My two crew members and I, as well as the entire space mission team, are fully prepared and confident (in our ability) to complete this space flight mission,” Ye said in translated remarks during a Tuesday news conference. Wednesday.
Tang and his colleagues plan to depart and return to Earth with a landing in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on April 30, closing a six-month stay in orbit that began with an October 25 launch.
The Shenzhou 18 flight is China’s seventh pilot mission to the space station and her fifth since staff started around the clock in June 2022. The launch was carried live on Chinese television, providing spectacular shots of the rocket’s climb into space and inside views of the taikonauts monitoring cockpit displays.
Ye is the only space veteran on the crew, and completed a 182-day tour of duty in 2021-22 as part of the Shenzhou 13 mission. Li Cong and Li Guangsu are rookies making their first flight.
As a first-timer, Li Guangsu said he was looking forward to traveling at 7.9 meters per second – about 17,500 mph – and “can’t wait” to experience weightlessness.
“No wings, but I can still fly!” he said at the traditional pre-flight news conference. “It is a great experience for me. I also want to take this opportunity to see the blue planet, to have a good look at the wonderful landscape of our motherland.”
During their stay in space, Ye and company will carry out a full slate of more than 90 scientific research projects as well as two or three spaceways to install external experiments, a micrometeoroid shield and other equipment.
Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, said the crew will also participate in ongoing science education outreach and unload the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship before its replacement Shenzhou 19 arrives in October.
China’s space station consists of three major modules connected in a T-shaped configuration. The Tianhe core module, launched in April 2021, is the heart of the complex, providing crew quarters, life support systems, communications, spacecraft controls, airlocks and multi-dock ports.
Two more large modules – Wentian and Mengtian – were connected to Tianhe in 2022. The station has a mass of about 100 tons.
The 450-ton International Space Station is made up of more than a dozen pressurized modules supplied by the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency and Japan. Construction work began in 1998 and the laboratory has been permanently staffed by rotating astronaut-cosmonaut crews since 2000.
The Tiangong station is permanently staffed from June 2022 with the arrival of the Shenzhou 14 crew. Although it is smaller than the ISS, the Chinese laboratory is newer and equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, computers and instrumentation.
NASA and its partners plan to retire the ISS in 2030, driving it remotely to a destructive re-entry into the atmosphere above the south Pacific Ocean, far away from shipping lanes and populated areas. That will leave Tiangong as the only government-operated space station in low-Earth orbit.
NASA is relying on commercial space stations operated by private companies to provide research opportunities in Earth orbit in the 2030s as the US agency continues. return to the moon later in the decade with the agency The free Artemis program,.
China plans to send its own taikonauts to the moon starting in 2030, fueling what NASA Administrator Bill Nelson calls a new superpower space race.
“It’s a fact: We’re in a space race,” he told Politico in an interview published last year. “And it’s true that we better watch out that they don’t get a place on the moon under the guise of scientific research. , this is our goal.”
The CGTN news agency, citing Lin, said that the Long March-10 lunar rocket, the Mengzhou (Dream Vessel) crew transport spacecraft and the Lanyue (Moon Acceptance) lunar lander have completed design reviews and prototypes are currently being tested.
NASA plans its the first Artemis pilot mission late next yearsending through NASA astronauts and a Canadian flight on a looping trip around the moon and back to test the agency’s Orion crew transport ship.
If successful, NASA plans to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole within the 2026-27 time frame. But that will depend on SpaceX landing its Starship lunar lander and the Super Heavy booster.
China is in the process of selecting the fourth batch of taikonauts Lin said will participate in space station activities as well as upcoming moon missions.
He repeated what he did before the launch of Shenzhou 17, saying that China, like the United States and its ISS partners, plans to start launching flyers from other nations, including space tourists .
“We will accelerate research and promote the participation of foreign astronauts and space tourists in flights with the Chinese space station,” he said in translated statements published by The Washington Post. “We certainly expect to see astronauts of different identities on the Chinese space station.”
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