Tiangong Space Station Welcomes 3 Chinese Astronauts for the 6-Month Shenzou 14 Mission

China's space station has just welcomed its new set of visitors early Sunday morning, roughly six hours after lifting off from Jiiyuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.

A Space.com report said that the country's three-person Shenzhou 14 mission arrived at "Tianhe, the core module of the under-construction Tiangong.

The capsule docked at Tianhe's Earth-facing port at 5:42 is, EDT, a Weibo post from the China Manned Space Agency specified.

The three crewmembers of Shenzhou, commander Chen Dong, Liu Yang, and Cai Zuzhe, are expected to spend approximately six hours aboard the 54-foot-long Tianhe, or Harmony of Heavens, which launched in April last year, to low Earth orbit, a related Hong Kong Free Press report said.

The Trio to Oversee 2 Other Tiangong Modules

During their time in orbit, the three astronauts will carry out a variety of scientific investigations and educational outreach activities, conduct several spacewalks, and install some new equipment inside and outside Tianhe, Chinese space officials have explained.

The trio will oversee the arrival of the other two modules of Tiangong, identified as Wentian, or Quest for the Heavens, and Mengtian, Dreaming of the Heavens, both scheduled to launch in July and October, respectively.

Both modules will attach on either side of Tianhe, forming a T-shaped orbiting outpost, around 20 percent as massive as the International Space Station or ISS.

Meanwhile, the two previous manned missions to Tianhe, Shenzhou 12 and Shenzhou 13, also sent three astronauts to the core module, a similar VOA report specified.

Previous Shenzhou Missions

Essentially, Shenzhou 12 launched in June last year and lasted for three months, while the six-month-long Shenzhou 13 took off in October, also last year and returned to Earth in the middle of April this year.

Shenzhou 15 is expected to launch around the end of this year. It is certainly tough to know as China is inclined not to divulge many details about its space missions until they are just about to take place.

If everything falls into place and as planned, Shenzhou 15 will overlap with Shenzhou 14, marking the first-ever crew handover of the Tiangong space station.

The launch and arrival of Shenzhou 14 at Tianhe continued a busy year in human spaceflight. This year has already seen two suborbital space tourism missions conducted by Blue Origin, an aerospace space company owned by Jeff Bezos, on March 31 and June 4.

A Busy Year in Space

The three cosmonauts launched to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 18, and the return of one NASA astronaut and two cosmonauts on a different Soyuz on March 30.

Meanwhile, Ax-1, the first-ever all-private manned mission to the ISS, lasted from April 8 to 25. Ax-1. Furthermore, Shenzhou 13's touchdown took place in mid-April, while Crew-4's liftoff, the latest contracted astronaut flight of SpaceX to the ISS for NASA, happened on April 27. Lastly, the landing of Crew-3 of SpaceX took place on May 6.

A report about China's space mission is shown on the South China Morning Post's YouTube video below:

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