China will launch the unmanned Shenzhou-22 spacecraft on Tuesday, its space authorities said on Monday, marking an effort to restore normal operations at the Tiangong space station after a damaged vessel forced an unexpected reshuffling of mission schedules.<\/p>\n
The Shenzhou-22 will replace the Shenzhou-21 return craft, which was brought back to Earth six months earlier than planned after another docked spacecraft, Shenzhou-20, sustained damage in early November. The early return left Tiangong\u2019s three-member crew without an operational return vehicle for 10 days \u2014 the first time the station has been without an evacuation option since reaching full operations in late 2022.<\/p>\n
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said the launch will take place at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, consistent with previous Shenzhou missions. Unlike its predecessors, Shenzhou-22 will fly without a crew to avoid exceeding Tiangong\u2019s long-term capacity of three astronauts.<\/p>\n
The damaged Shenzhou-20 remains docked to the space station. Spaceflight analysts have suggested that the vessel may need to be undocked and de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, but CMSA has not yet outlined its plan for the craft.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, structural issues detected on Shenzhou-20 required its crew to remain aboard Tiangong for an additional nine days alongside the newly arrived Shenzhou-21 astronauts, temporarily raising the station\u2019s occupancy to six \u2014 the upper limit of its design.<\/p>\n
With Shenzhou-22 in place as a functional return vehicle, China\u2019s next crewed mission is expected to be Shenzhou-23, scheduled for around April next year.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China will launch the unmanned Shenzhou-22 spacecraft on Tuesday, its space authorities said on Monday, marking an effort to restore normal operations at the Tiangong space station after a damaged vessel forced an unexpected reshuffling of mission schedules. The Shenzhou-22 will replace the Shenzhou-21 return craft, which was brought back to Earth six months earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[135,2228,6574,6327,6575,6576,330],"class_list":["post-20281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-china-manned-space-agency","tag-jiuquan-satellite-launch-center","tag-shenzhou-20","tag-shenzhou-21","tag-shenzhou-22","tag-tiangong"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}