A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 13 mission returned to Earth after spending almost exactly six months on the Chinese space station’s Tianhe core module. Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping, and Ye Guangfu departed Tianhe about nine hours earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A procedure that greatly reduces the reentry time to Earth worked perfectly. This was the first Chinese space mission to last six months, roughly twice as much as Shenzhou 12. This is the normal duration for the upcoming missions to the Chinese space station.