If an emergency arises aboard China’s Tiangong area station within the subsequent few days, its three astronaut residents could possibly be in hassle.
That trio — members of the Shenzhou 21 mission — arrived at Tiangong on Oct. 31 for a six-month keep. However their deliberate experience house is already gone. On Thursday night time (Nov. 13), the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft carried three totally different astronauts away from the station — members of the Shenzhou 20 mission, whose personal car was deemed unfit to hold folks again to Earth after being broken by a space-debris strike.
China keeps a Long March 2F rocket and Shenzhou spacecraft “in a state of near readiness” at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center as a matter of policy during crewed missions, as SpaceNews’ Andrew Jones noted. If one thing goes flawed on Tiangong, this standby lifeboat will be launched to the station as little as 8.5 days later.
That countdown has doubtless already begun for the Shenzhou 21 crew, as the shortage of a secure experience residence positively qualifies as a contingency.
Certainly, Chinese language area officers have already said that the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft might be launched to Tiangong (presumably with out anybody on board). They did not give a timeline, saying solely that the liftoff will happen “at an acceptable time sooner or later.”
Nevertheless it’s secure to imagine that launch day is close to; the nation absolutely would not need to expose its astronauts to any extra danger than is critical, and each day spent in orbit with no lifeboat is a danger.
The Shenzhou 21 astronauts’ plight calls to thoughts the expertise of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) in June 2024 on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Starliner suffered helium leaks and thruster points on the best way up, and NASA finally determined to deliver the spacecraft again to Earth uncrewed. That occurred with out incident in September 2024.
Wilmore and Williams, in the meantime, continued dwelling on the ISS till this previous March, turning a deliberate 10-day mission right into a practically nine-month affair. They finally got here residence on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule together with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexandr Gorbunov.
However the Shenzhou 21 astronauts are in a extra precarious spot in the mean time than Wilmore and Williams ever have been. There have been at all times non-Starliner lifeboats docked to the ISS through the NASA astronauts’ orbital keep, and so they may have squeezed into one in every of these craft for a cramped experience residence if one thing had gone terribly flawed on the ISS.
That does not appear to be an possibility for Tiangong’s present residents: The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft, the one crew-capable car docked to the station in the mean time, sports activities tiny cracks in one in every of its home windows due to the particles strike.
“The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft doesn’t meet the necessities for the astronauts’ secure return and can stay in orbit to proceed related experiments,” the state-run Xinhua information outlet reported on Thursday, citing data from the China Manned Area Company.
Shenzhou 21 is the tenth crewed mission to Tiangong, a three-module station that is about 20% as large because the ISS.
The mission consists of commander Zhang Lu, 48, who additionally flew on Shenzhou 15 in 2022, and two spaceflight rookies, Zhang Hongzhang and Wu Fei. Wu has the excellence of being the youngest member of China’s astronaut corps.
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