A confirmation has arrived that three Chinese taikonauts from the Shenzhou 16 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 fifth 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 16 mission are Jing Haipeng, Gui Haichao, and Zhu Yangzhu, whose names were announced only the day before the launch, as is customary for the Chinese. Commander Jing Haipeng is the first taikonaut on his fourth mission after participating in Shenzhou 7 and commanding Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 11. Gui Haichao is the first civilian to be part of a Chinese space mission, is a professor at Beihang University and science researcher who was selected precisely as a specialist to conduct sophisticated experiments. Zhu Yangzhu is a military pilot on his first space mission, in which he’s the station engineer.
The taikonauts from the Shenzhou 15 mission will return to Earth in early June, so they met their replacements from the Shenzhou 16 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. This meeting between crews is already becoming a habit and the station’s life support systems have already proved that they can support the presence of a doubled crew at least for a few days.
Regarding the possibility of hosting a larger crew, there’s a new expansion plan for the Tiangong space station that might even its volume. China continues to reveal its ambitions for space also with plans to send taikonauts to the Moon by 2030. That’s a very different mission from the ones conducted so far by the Chinese, so we can expect at least one intermediate mission, for example, a journey of a Shenzhou spacecraft carrying taikonauts around the Moon.
