After five years, a crew of Chinese taikonauts returns to orbit. The spacecraft Shenzhou-12 took off yesterday with a Long March 2F carrier from the base of Jiuquan in deserto in Gobi bringing the first three men aboard the new one Tianhe space station. The crew is under the command of the major-general Not Haiseng, a veteran already on his third flight into orbit and coming from the military aviation where he was a jet pilot. Of the new station there is only the first inhabited module and it will take another two years to complete. Then, in its outward form, it will resemble the famous one Russian Mir from the 1980s, so it will be very different from the architecture of the western ISS. But for Beijing, the new base whose name means “Milky Way” (like our galaxy) is a significant step forward because after the experiments with the first two Tiangong orbital laboratories, it is now building a large infrastructure around the Earth that is opposed to the ISS of NASA.
From left Liu Boming, Nie Haisheng and Tang Hongbo before departure (Getty)
The assembly of modules in space
Meanwhile the CNSA, the space agency of the “celestial empire”, continues to reaffirm its openness to collaborations from other countries by offering them the opportunity to conduct experiences aboard Tianhe. The taikonauts (prepared with six thousand hours of tests) are trained to perform the spacewalks necessary to complete the assembly of the modules. Two are planned so far. Before the arrival of Shenzhou-12, the Tianhzhou spacecraft had arrived by automatic flight and brought supplies and materials necessary for the activity of the first crew whose mission should last three months. With the start of the occupation of the new station, China underlines its role as a great space power engaged in both human flight and interplanetary exploration. After landing the rover on Mars, it is now also preparing an automatic mission to Jupiter.
June 17, 2021 (change June 17, 2021 | 12:43)
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