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<\/p>\nThe Shenzhou 22 mission, originally scheduled to fly next year, launched successfully on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at 04:11 UTC from Site 901 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China\u2019s Inner Mongolia province. Shenzhou 22, mounted atop a Chang Zheng-2F rocket, launched without crew and safely docked autonomously with the Tiangong space station after a three and a half hour orbital flight and rendezvous procedure.<\/p>\n
Shenzhou 22 launched in a southeasterly direction to insert the 8,100 kg spacecraft into an orbit inclined 41.47 degrees to the equator, which matches Tiangong\u2019s orbital inclination. The spacecraft, loaded with food and other supplies in place of crew, also maneuvered to match Tiangong\u2019s 386 by 391 km orbit before docking to one of Tiangong\u2019s two ports for Shenzhou spacecraft at 07:50 UTC.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) launched Shenzhou 22 to provide Tiangong\u2019s current crew with a safe spacecraft to ride home following on-orbit damage to the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft. This damage presumably was discovered in the days or weeks immediately before the Shenzhou 20 astronauts, Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie, were supposed to return home.<\/p>\n
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Shenzhou 21 crew (left to right): Zhang Hongzhang, Commander Zhang Lu and Wu Fei. (Credit: Xinhua)<\/p>\n
The current crew members aboard Tiangong \u2014 Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang \u2014 launched to Tiangong aboard Shenzhou 21 on Oct. 31. Until Shenzhou 22 docked, they only had the compromised Shenzhou 20 spacecraft available to them if an emergency were to force an evacuation of the station after Shenzhou 20\u2019s crew returned to Earth aboard the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft on Nov. 14 at a landing site in Inner Mongolia.<\/p>\n
The Shenzhou 20 crew and spacecraft were supposed to return to China on Nov. 5, but CMSA elected to delay the return due to damage to a window on the spacecraft\u2019s descent module, likely caused by a space debris impact. Damage was visible on the outer pane; the inner panes were not rated to withstand direct exposure to the plasma and heating of reentry.<\/p>\n
Tiangong, in its current state, typically supports a crew of three, but the station had to support six crew members for an additional nine days. The Shenzhou 20 crew needed to return home due to Tiangong\u2019s supply situation, so using Shenzhou 21 to return them was the most obvious near-term solution. The Shenzhou 20 crew spent a Chinese record 204 days in space before landing back in China aboard the Shenzhou 21 descent module.<\/p>\n
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The Shenzhou 20 crew prepare to disembark after returning to Earth in the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft on November 14, 2025. (Credit CMSA)<\/p>\n
Although Shenzhou-22 was originally scheduled to fly sometime in the spring of 2026, the rapid schedule change was made possible due to the Shenzhou spacecraft and the Chang Zheng-2F carrier rocket for Shenzhou 22 being prepared for a \u201claunch on need\u201d mission.<\/p>\n
Aerospace industry analysis (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n This preparation was in line with the CMSA\u2019s longstanding policy to prepare the spacecraft and rocket for the next Shenzhou mission, as well as the Shenzhou mission scheduled to fly at that time. The Shenzhou 22 mission will be the first launch-on-need flight in Chinese human spaceflight history.<\/p>\n The \u201claunch-on-need\u201d practice has, in fact, been used since the first space stations flew in the 1970s. Thruster leaks on Skylab 3\u2019s Apollo service module caused NASA to prepare the Skylab 4 mission\u2019s Saturn 1B rocket and an Apollo spacecraft for an emergency flight to dock with Skylab in the summer of 1973.<\/p>\n Shenzhou-21 launches from Jiuquan on Oct 31. (Credit: CCTV)<\/p>\n The modified Apollo command module would carry five astronauts back to Earth. Further analysis showed that the Skylab 3 Apollo spacecraft was still operational and could safely return the crew to Earth, so the Skylab 4 rocket and spacecraft were released to conduct their planned mission in November 1973.<\/p>\n In the 2000s, NASA had a launch-on-need policy for all Shuttle missions flown after the STS-107 disaster in February 2003. After a given Shuttle mission launched to ISS, if inspections carried out by the Shuttle\u2019s robotic arm found potentially fatal heat shield damage, the Shuttle\u2019s crew would stay aboard the Station until the next Shuttle mission \u2014 with a subset of its original crew \u2014 was ready to launch.<\/p>\n The launch-on-need policy also extended to the STS-125 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, with Shuttle Endeavour<\/em> standing by on Launch Complex 39B for the STS-400 rescue mission, one that was never needed. STS-135, the final flight of the Shuttle program, had a plan for multiple Soyuz spacecraft to rescue the STS-135 crew if needed.<\/p>\n Suspected coolant is seen leaking from the instrument and propulsion module aboard Soyuz MS-22. (Credit: NASA)<\/p>\n More recently, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft suffered a coolant leak in December 2022 \u2014 perhaps caused by space debris \u2014 while docked to ISS. Russia sent the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft uncrewed on Feb. 24, 2023, to give the Soyuz MS-22 crew a usable ride home, as the lack of cooling on MS-22 could have endangered the astronauts during the trip back to Earth. MS-22 returned safely to Earth without crew, and the MS-22 crew returned to Earth aboard Soyuz MS-23 on Sept. 27, 2023.<\/p>\n The Chinese program no doubt looked at these historical examples of how other space agencies handled compromised crew spacecraft in formulating its policies and current response to the Shenzhou 20 situation. As for Shenzhou 20 itself, the spacecraft remains docked to Tiangong for now, but will need to undock at some point to allow another Shenzhou to dock at the station.<\/p>\n When Shenzhou 20 is undocked from the station, CMSA could attempt to return it uncrewed to the Gobi Desert in China, or dispose of the spacecraft somewhere over the Pacific if engineers believe it is too damaged to survive reentry. However, Shenzhou 22 was loaded with some type of repair kit to enable Shenzhou 20 to try an uncrewed landing in China.<\/p>\n Shenzhou 21 from the Chinese space station Tiangong. (Credit: CMSA)<\/p>\n After Shenzhou 22 docks with Tiangong, the next scheduled Shenzhou launch will likely be Shenzhou 23 in the spring of 2026. China is also planning for one of its astronauts to spend about a year in space and to send a Pakistani astronaut to Tiangong for a short stay. CMSA is also preparing for an uncrewed orbital flight of Shenzhou\u2019s replacement \u2014 the Mengzhou spacecraft \u2014 next year.<\/p>\n (Lead image: Shenzhou 22 launches from Jiuquan, China on its uncrewed mission to the Tiangong station. Credit: Xinhua)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Shenzhou 22 mission, originally scheduled to fly next year, launched successfully on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at 04:11 UTC from Site 901 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China\u2019s Inner Mongolia province. Shenzhou 22, mounted atop a Chang Zheng-2F rocket, launched without crew and safely docked autonomously with the Tiangong space station after a […]<\/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":[7862,135,7821,6326,1578,329,265,330],"class_list":["post-23654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-chang-zheng","tag-china","tag-chinese","tag-cmsa","tag-jiuquan","tag-shenzhou","tag-space-station","tag-tiangong"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23654"}],"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=23654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Chang-Zheng-2F-launches-Shenzhou-21-MIssion-from-Jiuquan-Satellite-Launch-Cener-on-Oct-31-2025.png\")
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