Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country’s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will

As Astronauts Dock, China Takes Up Long-Term Residence in Orbit

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2021-06-20 20:00:09

Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country’s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will be a decade or more of continuous presence by Chinese astronauts in Earth’s orbit.

Six hours and 32 minutes after the astronauts blasted off from a base in the Gobi Desert on a clear, sunny morning, their spacecraft, Shenzhou-12, docked with the station’s core module.

“It was a perfect rendezvous and docking process,” Sun Jun, deputy director of the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, told CCTV, the state broadcaster, adding that the mission so far “fully achieved our original goal.”

With that, the Chinese station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, became one of two populated outposts in orbit. The other, the International Space Station, has operated for more than two decades, but its future is uncertain because of age, budget constraints and tensions between its main partners, the United States and Russia.

No such problems face the Chinese space program, which is building its station independently, though it has invited other countries to contribute experiments and may, in the future, welcome foreign astronauts.