China's Tiangong Space Station Wentian Laboratory Module Successfully Docks

As China finishes the Tiangong Space Station in the coming months, it added a science laboratory on Monday, launched from the Wenchang space base in the tropical island province of Hainan. A big group of amateur photographers and space enthusiasts watched as the laboratory launched.

Tiangong Space Station Launches a Laboratory

According to the China Manned Space Agency, the Wentian Laboratory successfully docked with the Tianhe living area of the Tiangong Space Station after 13 hours of flight at 3:13 a.m., Monday.

The Xinhua News Agency posted the three astronauts inside the expanded space station on its Twitter account. According to the tweet, the Shenzhou-14 astronauts opened the hatch door of Wentian on Monday at 10:03 a.m. (Beijing Time) and entered the module.

According to the state-owned Global Times, the 23-ton Wentian laboratory is heavier than any other single-module spaceship in orbit and is intended for scientific and biological investigations.

The China Manned Space Agency describes the event by stating that a massive heavy-lift Long March-5B Y3 carrier rocket launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site at 2:22 p.m. on Sunday. The Wentian module detached from the rocket body and entered a predetermined orbit after a roughly eight-minute flight, signaling the success of the launch mission.

On Xinhua's second tweet, the agency posted, "Wentian, the first lab module of China's space station, has successfully docked with the combination of the Tianhe core module at 3:13 a.m. Monday (Beijing Time)."

Wentian is anticipated to perform a semi-autonomous rendezvous and docking with the Tianhe core cabin in the front port, and in a few hours, the Tianhe space station core module will receive a new spacecraft for the first time while the crew is on board.

China Tiangong Space Station's Three Module

Wentian is the second of the three modules that make up the main T-shape structure of the China Space Station. The first module was launched in April 2021, a 16-meter-long Tianhe core module. The Mengtian, the second laboratory part, is scheduled to debut in October.

China's space program is run by the People's Liberation Army, the military component of the ruling Communist Party, and has mostly proceeded with the Tiangong program without the cooperation of other countries.

Chinese manned space authorities estimate that the China Space Station's future extended structure will eventually weigh more than 180 tons. With Wentian currently docked to the Tianhe, the combined weight of the space station has already surpassed 50 tons.

Wentian's electricity designer, Liang Xiaofeng, told the Global Times that while technically speaking, the extension has been made possible by Wentian, further plans will still align with the entire concept.

"We will have to analyze and sort out the needs for each plan, but we definitely have acquired the key technologies [for module expansion] in reserve," he said.

According to Pang Zhihao, a renowned space scientist, future modules to be added to the T-shape basic framework might be foreign spacecraft like lab modules or manned spacecraft.

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