Cosmic Penguin
Geek Penguin in GTO
Last week I have talked about the only way you can travel to the ISS safe and soundly - i.e. travel to Russia and join a Soyuz flight. Which won't change for the next few years at least.
But getting into orbit? There's another way - although only used 4 times up to now.
Yup, the (usually) secretive Chinese are flying again!
A crew of 3 (not yet announced - although the identity of the female crew member is more or less certain) will fly on the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft next week - probably on June 11 at around 09:40 UTC - and dock to the mini Chinese spacelab Tiangong 1 the following day. Don't expect a lot of surprises for the 15 day (3 days longer than Shenzhou 9) mission though - rather than trying something new for the Chinese, this mission is about settling down into human spaceflight routine, as they continue to refine the way to establish a space station and operate experiments in orbit. Since rendezvous and docking has been tried out during the past year and half, the mission will go a little bit further and do a fly-around of TG-1 (which will not be used again for human spaceflights after this mission). More experiments will be done and some new equipment (e.g. new "floor" boards) will be installed. In another first the Chinese astronauts will finally open them up and hold an educational Q&A section during their stay - something that ISS astronauts do once in a while already.
Today the rocket, complete with the spacecraft stacked, was rolled out from the VAB at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center deep in the desert in north-western China:
More reports about this second-most important Chinese spaceflight mission of the year will come soon on this thread! :tiphat:
But getting into orbit? There's another way - although only used 4 times up to now.
Yup, the (usually) secretive Chinese are flying again!
A crew of 3 (not yet announced - although the identity of the female crew member is more or less certain) will fly on the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft next week - probably on June 11 at around 09:40 UTC - and dock to the mini Chinese spacelab Tiangong 1 the following day. Don't expect a lot of surprises for the 15 day (3 days longer than Shenzhou 9) mission though - rather than trying something new for the Chinese, this mission is about settling down into human spaceflight routine, as they continue to refine the way to establish a space station and operate experiments in orbit. Since rendezvous and docking has been tried out during the past year and half, the mission will go a little bit further and do a fly-around of TG-1 (which will not be used again for human spaceflights after this mission). More experiments will be done and some new equipment (e.g. new "floor" boards) will be installed. In another first the Chinese astronauts will finally open them up and hold an educational Q&A section during their stay - something that ISS astronauts do once in a while already.
Today the rocket, complete with the spacecraft stacked, was rolled out from the VAB at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center deep in the desert in north-western China:
More reports about this second-most important Chinese spaceflight mission of the year will come soon on this thread! :tiphat:
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