A confirmation has arrived that three Chinese taikonauts from the Shenzhou 15 mission reached the Chinese space station Tiangong with an automated docking maneuver. They blasted off about seven hours earlier on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. They form the fourth crew of the Chinese space station and will remain there for about six months, the standard duration for a mission.
The three taikonauts, as the Chinese call their astronauts, of the Shenzhou 15 mission are Deng Qingming, Fei Junlong, and Zhang Lu. Information released by Chinese authorities is limited even though Fei Junlong is a veteran of China’s space program. We know these are three Chinese Air Force pilots selected for the Armed Forces Astronaut Corps. Mission commander Fei Junlong, 57, is a major general who already spent about 5 days in orbit as part of the Shenzhou 6 mission in 2005. Deng Qingming is 56, while Zhang Lu is 46.
The taikonauts from the Shenzhou 14 mission will return to Earth in early December, so they met their replacements from the Shenzhou 15 mission and the two crews will work together for a few days. This was possible due to the completion of the first phase of the construction of the Tiangong space station with the Wentian and Mengtian laboratories being equipped to host more people. The days spent with the doubled crew will also be useful to test the station’s life support systems.
In previous crew turnovers, the Tianhe core module was empty for a few days between the departure of one crew and the arrival of the next. The expansion means that from now on, the Tiangong space station will always be occupied by a crew, another step forward in China’s space program.
The availability of the two space laboratories Wentian and Mengtian means that taikonauts will be able to increase the amount of experiments they will conduct in orbit. Part of the Shenzhou 15 mission will consist precisely of the installation of experiments. This is a new phase of operations, which will include some spacewalks to carry out various tasks outside the Tiangong space station such as the installation of equipment for the laboratories. China’s ambitious space program continues to move forward.
