On Sunday, June 5, the three Chinese astronauts, also called taikonauts, arrived at the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station.
The three astronauts are expected to stay at the unfinished space station for six months to help finish its construction.
Astronauts Arrive at Tiangong
According to Space.com, the three-person crew includes Cai Xuzhe, Chen Dong, and Liu Yang, who made history as the first Chinese woman in space during China's Shenzhou 9 mission in 2012.
The three astronauts boarded the Shenzhou 14 spacecraft that took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on June 2 and docked with Tianhe.
While the Chinese astronauts are in orbit, they are expected to conduct several spacewalks and prepare the Tiangong space station to arrive at two other lab modules: Wentian and Mengtian.
The Wentian module is set to launch in July, and the Mengtian module is set to launch in October.
As noted by CBS News, the two modules will attack the opposite sides of the Tianhe core module in order to create a T-shaped station that will be smaller than the International Space Station (ISS).
China aims to complete the construction of the Tiangong space station by the end of 2022, with the launch of the Xuntian telescope module scheduled for 2023.
Shenzhou 14 is now China's third crewed mission to the Tiangong space station since the launch of Tianhe in April 2021.
The latest astronauts are set to team up with the crew of Shenzhou 15 towards the end of 2022, marking the first time the station will hold six astronauts.
Previous Shenzhou Missions
The two other crewed missions to Tianhe, Shenzhou 12 and Shenzhou 13, also sent three astronauts to the core module.
In June 2021, Shenzhou 12 was launched, and it lasted for three months, and in October 2021, Shenzhou 13 was launched, and it lasted for six months before it returned to Earth in April, according to Business Standard.
Shenzhou 15 is expected to launch around 2022, but it is not confirmed yet. China did not reveal a lot of details about its space missions until they were just about to happen.
If all goes according to plan, Shenzhou 15's schedule will overlap with Shenzhou 14. This will mark the Tiangong space station's first-ever crew handover.
The launch and arrival of Shenzhou 14 at Tianhe continued a busy 2022 in the spaceflight schedule.
In early 2022, there were two suborbital space tourism missions conducted by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' aerospace company. The two suborbital space tourism missions were launched on March 31 and June 4, respectively.
The launch of three cosmonauts to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and the return of a NASA astronaut and two cosmonauts on a different Soyuz also happened in 2022.
Other events this year were the launch of Ax-1, which was the first-ever all-private crewed mission to the ISS, the touchdown of Shenzhou 13, the liftoff of Crew-4, SpaceX's latest contracted astronaut flight to the ISS, and the landing of SpaceX's Crew-3 on May 6.
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Written by Sophie Webster
