Background Information on China's Human Spaceflight Program

China’s human spaceflight program, Project 921, officially began in 1992.   The scheduled launch tomorrow of Shenzhou-9 is the ninth flight in the series, but only the fourth to carry a crew.

Shenzhou 1-4 were automated tests of the spacecraft; Shenzhou-8 was an automated test of rendezvous and docking procedures with the Tiangong-1 space station, which also was unoccupied.  The following table provides information on the three crewed missions flown to date and tomorrow’s mission.

 

Mission	Launch Date	Crew	Comments
Shenzhou-5	Oct. 15, 2003	Yang Liwei	First Chinese human spaceflight mission; 21 hours, 23 min
Shenzhou-6	Oct. 12, 2005	Fei Junlong Nie Haisheng	First Chinese 2-person crew; 5 day mission
Shenzhou-7	Sept. 25, 2008	Zhai Zhigang Liu Boming Jing Haipeng	First Chinese 3-person crew; First Chinese spacewalk (by Zhai for 22 min, Liu also did stand-up EVA in airlock for about 2 min) 3 day mission; small (40 kg) subsatellite ejected
Shenzhou-9	July 16, 2012 (scheduled)	Jing Haipeng Liu Wang Liu Yang	Scheduled: 10 day mission; manual docking with Tiangong-1 space station; Liu Yang first Chinese woman astronaut

 

The Tiangong-1 space station was launched in September 2011.