Chinese Space Station Crew Home After Weather Delay

China’s Shenzhou-19 space station crew landed in Inner Mongolia early this morning Eastern Daylight Time, about a day later than planned because of bad weather at the landing site.  Their replacements on Shenzhou-20 arrived at Tiangong-3 last week, continuing permanent occupancy of China’s space station. Two of the Shenzhou-19 taikonauts set a new world record of 9 hours and 6 minutes for a single spacewalk.

China launched the first Tiangong-3 module in 2021. Two more were added in 2022 and the first crew changeover took place in December 2022. The Shenzhou-19/Shenzhou-20 handover is the sixth, following the roughly six-month pattern used for the U.S.-Russian-Japanese-European-Canadian International Space Station for the past 24 years.

Shenzhou-19 launched on October 29, 2024 EDT (October 30 in China) and landed at the Dongfeng landing site in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 1:08 am EDT this morning, April 30 (1:08 pm local time in China).  They were supposed to return a day earlier, but winds were unfavorable.

The crew included two men, Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdon, and a woman, Wang Haoze. Wang is China’s third female taikonaut and is “currently China’s only female space flight engineer” according to China’s state news agency Xinhua.

They arrived back in Beijing a few hours later.

The Shenzhou-19 crew arrived in Beijing by plane on Wednesday after completing a six-month space station mission. Read more: https://t.co/qJ8ywtpyYh pic.twitter.com/qgL6i4RNug

— China Xinhua Sci-Tech (@XHscitech) April 30, 2025

The all-male Shenzhou-20 crew, Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie, arrived on April 24 and were greeted by their Shenzhou-19 colleagues.

The three astronauts aboard China’s Shenzhou-20 spaceship have entered the country’s space station and met with another astronaut trio in the early hours of Friday, starting a new round of in-orbit crew handover https://t.co/WqY3jNZSP5 pic.twitter.com/qiUSo6W8Hv

— China Xinhua Sci-Tech (@XHscitech) April 24, 2025

Shenzhou-19 was Cai’s second spaceflight and the first for Song and Wang.  Cai and Song performed three spacewalks. The first, on December 17, 2024, lasted 9 hours and 6 minutes and set a new world spacewalk duration record surpassing the 8 hour 56 minute spacewalk by NASA’s James Voss and Susan Helms in March 2001.

In total, Cai has performed five spacewalks, the most for any Chinese taikonaut. His first two were on Shenzhou-14. Xinhua cited Cai “fulfilling the most EVA tasks to date” as one of the two “historic milestones” of the mission.  The other was Wang’s serving as China’s female flight engineer.

Two other Chinese women have flown in space, however. Liu Yang was China’s first woman in space on Shenzhou-9 in 2012 and flew again on Shenzhou-14 in 2022. Wang Yaping was part of the Shenzhou-13 crew and the first Chinese woman to make a spacewalk in 2021.  Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman to make a spacewalk in July 1984. NASA’s Kathy Sullivan was the first American three months later.

During their 183 days in space, the crew performed “88 projects spanning space life science, microgravity, fundamental physics, space materials, space medicine, and new space technologies.”  As shown in a video from the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), they also tested a robotic pipeline inspection system using simulated pipelines. The robot features “23 degrees of freedom, draws biological inspiration from echinoderm animals like starfish and sea cucumbers, mimicking their tube feet with an innovative movement mechanism.”

The crew also worked with a flying robot, Xiao Hang, from the Harbin Institute of Technology that can fly around the space station performing a variety of tasks to assist the crew.