2023-05-30 11:15:02
All taikonauts until now were military
Aerospace engineer and researcher Gui Haichao, 36, will join the crew of the Chinese space station, Tiangong
From the Gobi desert in north China, the Long March 2F rocket propelled into space on Tuesday morning the nave Shenzhou-16, to arrive at the Tiangong space station with three taikonauts, which is what the Asian giant calls astronauts. For five months, they will be in charge of executing the “application and development” phase of the ambitious Chinese space program, as the mission commander, veteran General Jing Haipeng (56 years old), who has already made four trips, announced before the launch. space, a national record.
But the protagonist of the day has been the first Chinese civilian to join a mission beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. Until now, all the astronauts were members of the People’s Liberation Army (EPL). Oh the news that a university professor, Gui Haichao (36 years old), an aerospace engineer and researcher at Beihang University in Beijing, has joined the crew.
After graduation, the researcher spent two years at York University in Toronto, participating in a postdoctoral program on integrated orbital and directional control technology for sophisticated spacecraft.
In the spring of 2018, the Chinese authorities announced that they were looking for civilian payload experts for the expansion of the space station. “We were told that the positions of space flight engineer and scientific payload specialist would be open to civilians working for non-military research entities. It was a very valuable opportunity. I dreamed of doing my research in space,” Gui recalled in an interview with the newspaper China Daily. So, he was one of the 2,500 selected candidates. A couple of years later, with the list reduced to 18 experts, the professor was finally chosen for the mission.
The Shenzhou-16 crew is rounded out by another spaceflight rookie, pilot Zhu Yangzhu (36), who holds the rank of colonel in the PLA ground forces. The astronauts will replace their three companions who have been aboard Tiangong (which means “heavenly palace”) for six months, conducting research and assembling equipment. The spacecraft is expected to join the station’s Tianhe core module, 400 kilometers above the ground, after a journey of less than seven hours.
“The crew will carry out in-orbit tests and experiments to study novel quantum phenomena, high-precision space-time frequency systems, the verification of general relativity and the origin of life”, reads the note published by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).
In recent years, Beijing has accelerated its space race with milestones such as landing a probe on the far side of the Moon for the first time. That was in 2019. A year later, a robot was sent to the star to bring back up to two kilograms of lunar dust and rocks. Before 2030, he plans to launch a manned mission to the Moon.
200 launches in a decade
With more than 200 rockets launched in the past decade, China continues to make great strides to be the leading space power with its new permanent station, Tiangong, whose construction began after the United States excluded Beijing from the Space Station in 2011. International, largely due to concerns about the Chinese space program’s ties to the PLA.
Tiangong now has three key modules: two research laboratories, Wentian and Meengtian, which were launched in 2022, and the Tianhe module, for crew members to inhabit, launched into orbit in 2021. It also plans to launch a new module scheduled to dock with the current station in T-shape to create a cross-shaped structure.
Apart from Tiangong, which will be operational for at least the next 10 years, the only station currently in service is the International Space Station, operated by the agencies of the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Union, which was scheduled to to retire in 2024. However, NASA warned a few months ago that the life of this station could be extended until 2030.
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