Yesterday, three Chinese astronauts (or tycoons) returned to Earth to complete the Shenzhou 13 mission. The mission was the second space flight to build China’s first space station, Tiangong. The Shenzhou 13 crew of Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu were launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert last October. The astronaut crew then spent 183 days on the Tiangong space station, establishing 180 days (or six months) as the normal time that future Chinese mission crews would orbit. It was the largest mission in the history of China’s manned space program. It took nine hours for the astronauts to land on Earth after disconnecting the return capsule from Tiangong’s Tianhe nuclear unit. The capsule fell back into Inner Mongolia at 9:56 a.m. local time on Saturday morning. In an interview on state television, astronaut Wang Yaping said: “I want to tell my daughter that mom came back after she arrived for the stars.” Wang Yaping became the first Chinese woman astronaut to take a spacewalk during the mission. The crew also taught physics lessons to high school students across China. However, most of the mission was to test the station’s capabilities. However, they are still 157 days away from the largest mission of the International Space Station (ISS), where the American astronaut Scott Kelly and the Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko spent 340 days in the period from March 2015 to March next year. NASA conducted medical experiments to observe the effects of long-lived orbit, using Scott Kelly’s twin brother and retired astronaut Mark Kelly as a reference point on Earth. The Chinese space program has two more Shenzhou missions scheduled for 2022. These two missions aim to complete the construction of the Tiangong space station before the end of the year. Two more modules will be attached to the Tianhe unit. The completed Tiangong will be about 20 percent the size of the ISS.
