Five years later, China has sent people back into space. But not to go back and forth, to stay. That too again, not for one, two or seven days, but for three months in a row. On Thursday (June 17th), three Chinese astronauts took off from a launch site in the Gobi Desert to the new space station, 380 kilometres from the earth’s surface.
The three Chinese astronauts are Ni Haisheng, Li Booming and Tang Hongbo. Seven hours after the start of the journey, the Shenzhou-12 capsule or vehicle carrying them reached the space center.
Inside the station, the three astronauts will be housed in a 16-meter-long and four-meter-wide cylinder-shaped room called Tiane. From there they will walk in space, see and research.
Seven hours after their departure, news of their arrival reached the control room of the expedition, and the waiting Chinese scientists burst into cheers. The creation of a new station in space and the sending of people there for a long time is another example of China’s gradual increase in space power.
In the last six months, China has shown all the outstanding scientific achievements in space. In December last year, a robot-powered spacecraft sent by China brought soil and rock samples from the moon for the first time in nearly 50 years. China has landed a six-wheeled robot on Mars. Various pictures are regularly coming from Mars through that robot. The two tasks were very complicated.
