China's Human Spaceflight Program: Background and List of Launches

China’s human spaceflight program, Project 921, officially began in 1992. The launch of Shenzhou-10 today is the tenth flight in the series, but only the fifth 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. 

Tiangong-1 itself was launched in 2011.  It first hosted a crew with Shenzhou-9 and now awaits the crew of Shenzhou-10.   The following table provides information on the five Chinese human spaceflight missions with crews launched to date.  (A SpacePolicyOnline.com list of ALL Chinese human spaceflight launches, including the automated flights, is also available.) Chinese astronauts are often called “taikonauts” in the West.  English-language Chinese reports call them astronauts.

 

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	Jing Haipeng Liu Wang Liu Yang	Automatic and manual docking with Tiangong-1 First Chinese space station crew             Liu Yang first Chinese woman astronaut 13 day mission
Shenzhou-10	June 11, 2013	Nie Haisheng Zhang Xiaoguang Wang Yaping	Planned 15 day mission includes docking with Tiangong-1; conduct manual docking test, various experiments. Wang second Chinese women in space. China calls her their first teacher in space because she will give a physics lecture from space, but she is a transport aircraft pilot, not a teacher, by training.

The Tiangong-1 space station is a small (8.6 metric ton) module.   As first space stations go, it is rather modest — just less than half the mass of the world’s first space station, Salyut 1. Launched in 1971, it had a mass of about 18.6 metric tons. The first U.S. space station, Skylab, launched in 1973, had a mass of about 77 metric tons. Today’s International Space Station (ISS), a partnership among the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe, and Canada, has a mass of about 400 metric tons and has been permanently occupied by 2-6 person crews rotating on 4-6 month missions since the year 2000.