China Launches New Space Station Crew

China launched a new three-person crew to their Tiangong-3 space station today. Shenzhou-21 lifted off at 11:44 am EDT and arrived at the space station about three hours later where the crew was greeted by the current residents with whom they will swap places. Tiangong-3 has been permanently occupied by crews rotating on roughly 6-month schedules since 2022. Coincidentally, today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Russian-American crew that initiated permanent occupancy of the International Space Station. They floated through the ISS hatch two days later on November 2, 2000 and not a day has gone by since then that people haven’t been aboard.

As usual, China did not reveal the crew of Shenzhou-21 until yesterday along with the formal announcement of the launch date and time. They are Commander Zhang Lu, flight engineer Wu Fei, and payload specialist Zhang Hongzhang. This is the second flight for the 48-year-old Zhang Lu and the first for the other two. At 32 years of age, Wu is the youngest member of China’s astronaut corps. Zhang Hongzhang is 39 and a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.

It was a nighttime liftoff at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert, 11:44 pm Beijing Time.

Xinhua posted at 3:42:15 am Beijing Time that docking had occurred, but didn’t provide the exact time.

China’s Shenzhou-21 crewed spaceship successfully docked with the space station combination early Saturday morning, according to the China Manned Space Agency. #Shenzhou21 pic.twitter.com/RUOp6IuM9K

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) October 31, 2025

Accompanying the Shenzhou-21 crew are four mice, the first time rodents will be aboard a Chinese space station. Chinese Manned Space Agency spokesman Zhang Jingbo said the two male and two female mice will be studied to determine how space conditions like microgravity affect their behavior before returning to Earth for further scientific research.

Xinhua reported the mice will return on “a spaceship,” adding they’d be in space for 5-7 days. That suggests they’re coming back with the Shenzhou-20 crew — Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie — who will head home after a handover with Shenzhou-21. They launched on April 25 so will have accumulated a little more than six months on this mission and conducted four spacewalks. Commander Chen Dong is on this third spaceflight, while the other two are rookies.

China’s human spaceflight program got off to a slow start. After four uncrewed test flights between 1999 and 2002, Shenzhou-5 launched in 2003 with China’s first taikonaut, Yang Liwei. Only five more crews were launched through 2019, three of which visited China’s first two small (8.5 Metric Ton) space stations, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2.

The launch of Tiangong-3’s first module, Tianhe, in 2021 opened a new era.  After two short-duration missions, Shenzhou-12 and Shenzhou-13, the addition of two more modules, Wentian and Mengtian, and the beginning of cargo resupply missions with Tianzhou spacecraft, permanent occupancy began with Shenzhou-14 in 2022. Tiangong-3 is about 66 Metric Tons.

The world’s first space stations were launched by the Soviet Union in 1971 (Salyut 1) and the United States in 1973 (Skylab). The Soviets continued launching and operating a series of space stations — Salyut 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 and Mir (Salyut 2 was a failure) — through 2001, while the United States had a long space station hiatus between the final Skylab flight in 1974 and launch of the first U.S.-built module for the ISS in 1998 (Node 1 or Unity).

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991, U.S.-Russian space cooperation blossomed and Russia joined the U.S.-European-Canadian-Japanese space station program. The first crew to board the ISS 25 years ago Sunday was NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko. People — and occasional mice — have been aboard ever since.

The ISS was mostly assembled over 12 years (1998-2010) and currently has a mass of about 420 Metric Tons. ISS is much larger than Tiangong-3, although China plans to expand Tiangong-3 in coming years.