Chinese launch their first civilian astronaut into space – 05/30/2023 – Sidereal Messenger
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Late last Monday night (29), the CMSA, the Chinese manned space agency, launched the Shenzhou-16 mission, the first in that country’s program to have a civilian astronaut.
The Chang Zheng 2F rocket took off on schedule, at 10:31 pm (Brasília time), from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, and the spacecraft docked to the Tiangong space station about seven hours later, at 5:29 am Tuesday.
The crew is made up of commander Jing Haipeng, a veteran on his fourth visit to space, flight engineer Zhu Yangzhu and payload specialist Gui Haichao — a professor at Beihang University and the first Chinese civilian to go into space.
Since the pioneering flight of Yang Liwei, the country’s first astronaut, launched in 2003 on the Shenzhou-5 mission, everyone who had flown into space through China had military training. The program itself, by the way, is run by the military.
Upon arriving at the Chinese station Tiangong, the group was greeted by the crew of Shenzhou-15, Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu. This trio has been in space since November and should return to Earth next Saturday (3). In these few days, Tiangong will have six crew members.
The successful flight of Shenzhou-16 also sets a world record: for the first time, 17 people are in orbit at the same time. In addition to the Tiangong sextet, the International Space Station (ISS), a project led by the US and Russia (in a cooperation that continues, despite the strain on relations between the two countries), is currently home to 11 other people: five Americans, three Russians , two Saudis and one Emirati. (The three Arabs were brought into commercial agreements with the American company Axiom Space, which promotes private flights to the station.)
The Shenzhou-16 crew must remain in orbit for six months, following the Chinese plans to keep its orbital space station permanently inhabited (like the ISS, occupied since 2000). In parallel, the CMSA is developing a program to send astronauts to the Moon, which, according to the Chinese, should happen before 2030.
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