Chinese Space Station Crew Back on Earth

The three-man Shenzhou-16 space station crew is back on Earth after 5 months on Tiangong-3. Their replacements arrived a few days ago, continuing China’s practice of keeping Tiangong-3 permanently occupied by crews rotating on 5-6 month schedules just like the International Space Station.  This is new for China, but the ISS is about to celebrate 23 years of permanent occupancy.

The Shenzhou-16 taikonauts launched on May 29 EDT and docked about 6.5 hours later.  China provides very little information about what their space station crews do while aboard other than conducting scientific experiments. Today when they undocked, they circled the space station to take photographs that hopefully will be made available publicly.

The landing seemed to go nominally and the recovery crew opened the hatch within minutes, but it took an unusally long time, almost 50 minutes, before the crew exited the capsule.  They looked well once they were out, however.

Watch: Shenzhou-16 manned spaceship successfully lands in N China #SpaceChina #Shenzhou16 pic.twitter.com/gSsyTMHAER

— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) October 31, 2023

Their replacements, Shenzhou-17, arrived on October 26. This is the third Chinese crew rotation. The first was just under a year ago when the Shenzhou-14 crew was relieved by Shenzhou-15 in November 2022.

Historically China’s human spaceflight program proceeded at a slow but steady pace.

Two weeks ago they celebrated the 20th anniversary of launching their first taikonaut, Yang Liwei, on October 15, 2003.

It was another two years before their next human spaceflight launch, a two-person crew in 2005. Then three years until next, a three-person crew in 2008.  In 2011, they launched their first small space station, Tiangong-1, which was visited by one crew in 2012 and another in 2013. Then another three-year break until 2016 when Tiangong-2 was launched and visited by one crew. That was followed by a five-year hiatus until the launch of the first of the three Tiangong-3 modules, Tianhe, in 2021 and its first short-duration crew a few months later.

Tiangong-3 is a turning point. Now composed of three modules — Tianhe, Mentian, and Wengtian — it is routinely resupplied by Tianzhou cargo spacecraft and permanently occupied. While small compared to the ISS, about 66 Metric Tons compared to 420 MT, it is certainly adequate.

China has lunar ambitions as well. They currently say they want to land taikonauts on the Moon by 2030, although when they announced their International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) initiative two years ago they didn’t expect that to happen until the mid-2030s.