A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 12 mission returned to Earth after spending about three months on the Chinese space station’s Tianhe core module. Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming, and Tang Hongbo had left Tianhe about a day earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It was the longest Chinese space mission completed so far but the next missions to the Chinese space station are expected to last six months.