Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register SHANGHAI, April 16 (Reuters) – Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after 183 days in space, state television said, completing the country’s largest manned space mission to date. The astronauts landed nine hours after leaving a base unit of China’s first space station. While in orbit, Shenzhou-13 astronauts took control of the Tianhe Living Unit manually for what the state media called a “docking experiment” with the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register After launching in October, the astronauts – Zhai Zhigang, Ye Guangfu and a female crew member Wang Yaping – spent 183 days in space, completing the fifth of the 11 missions needed to complete the space station by the end of the year. . Shenzhou-13 was the second of four crew missions scheduled to complete construction of the space station, which began last April. Shenzhou-12 returned to Earth in September. China’s next two missions will be the Tianzhou-4, a cargo spacecraft, and the three-person Shenzhou-14 mission, Shao Limin, deputy chief technology officer of the Manned Spaceship System, according to state media. Banned by the United States from orbiting the International Space Station (ISS), China has spent the past decade developing technologies to build its own space station, the only one in the world outside the ISS. China, which aims to become a space force by 2030, has successfully launched probes to explore Mars and became the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reports from Liangping Gao in Beijing and Andrew Galbraith in Shanghai. Edited by: Raju Gopalakrishnan Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
