China’s Spaceflight Success Sets Stage for Big Space Station

The successful landing of China's latest manned space mission this week cast a spotlight on the country's growing human spaceflight skills as it hones the capabilities needed to build a huge, permanently crewed space station.

During the 15-day Shenzhou 10 spaceflight, three Chinese astronauts accomplished both automatic and manual dockings to China's Tiangong 1 space laboratory, where they lived and worked during the mission. The crew also achieved a two-hour-long fly-around of the module, a first in space for China seen an effort to sharpen rendezvous expertise useful for future space station construction.

Aboard the Tiangong 1, the Shenzhou 10 crew tested space medicine and conducted various technology experiments. The astronauts held China's first public space lesson, a televised view of life inside Tiangong 1, and also replaced the lab module's soft flooring with hard flooring, which was deemed necessary for the crew to better maintain their microgravity footing. [See photos from China's Shenzhou 10 space mission]

The Shenzhou 10 crew made a parachute landing early Wednesday morning (June 26) local time, setting down within a target zone in the central Inner Mongolia, with the three astronauts commander Nie Haisheng, Wang Yaping (the second Chinese woman to fly in space) and Zhang Xiaoguang leaving the landed module safe and sound.

China's next steps in space

In a post-landing press conference, Wang Zhaoyao, Director General of the China Manned Space Agency, said, "With a complete success of this spaceflight mission as a milestone, China's manned space program will enter into a new phase of manned space station construction."

According to a report from the Asia News Network, Wang said the country would loft the Tiangong 2 space lab around 2015. Three years later, an experimental core space station module would be lofted, he said, with the focus on constructing a 60-ton, multi-module space station for China by 2020.

Wang said that between 2015 and 2020, a series of cargo and piloted spacecraft would deliver supplies and transport astronauts to the space lab and space station.

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China's Spaceflight Success Sets Stage for Big Space Station