BEIJING (AP) – Three astronauts who lived for 90 days on the Chinese space station set off on Thursday to prepare to return to Earth.
The national space agency said Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo boarded the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft and disembarked from the space station at 8:56 a.m. Thursday (0056 GMT).
State radio station CCTV aired footage of the astronauts securing packages inside their spacecraft, which will have to parachute to a location in the Gobi Desert, near the Jiuquan launch center.
Astronauts have already set China’s record for the most amount of time spent in space. After launching on June 17, Mission Commander Nie and astronauts Liu and Tang took two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter mechanical arm, and made a video call with Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
Prior to the decoupling, the astronauts were downloading data from their experiments and assuring that the station would continue to operate unmanned, CCTV reported.
The trip home is expected to take at least 30 hours, according to CCTV. Before leaving, Nie and colleagues expressed their gratitude for the “24-hour support and devotion of all staff.”
Four ground drills have been conducted at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of northern China to ensure the safe return of the crew.
Although the Chinese military, which manages the space program, has made few details public, the trio of astronauts are expected to join 90-day missions to the station over the next two years to make it fully operational. functional.
The government has not announced the names of the next group of astronauts or the launch date of Shenzhou-13.
China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so on its own.
When completed with the addition of two more modules, the station will weigh approximately 66 tons, a fraction the size of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh about 450 tons when complete.
In preparation for the permanent station, China launched two experimental modules over the past decade: Jiangong-1 was abandoned before burning during an uncontrolled loss of orbit. Its successor, the Tiangong-2, was taken out of orbit in 2018 under full control.
China launched its bid to build these facilities in the early 1990s following successes in previous missions and their exclusion from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections to the secret nature. of the Chinese program and close military ties.
U.S. law requires Congressional approval for contact between U.S. and Chinese space programs, but China collaborates with space experts from other countries, including France, Sweden, Russia, and Italy.
China has also gone ahead with unmanned missions, especially in lunar exploration. It has placed a rover on the least explored side of the Moon and in December, the Chang’e 5 spacecraft returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.
This year, China also landed its Tianwen-1 spacecraft on Mars, with its companion rover Zhurong venturing out for life tests.
Another program calls for picking up ground from an asteroid, which has been a particular focus of Japan’s rival space program.
China also plans to send another mission in 2024 to retrieve lunar samples and has expressed a desire to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for these projects. . According to reports, a highly secretive space plan is also being developed.
The Chinese space program has advanced steadily and prudently and has largely avoided the failures that marked the American and Russian programs that were locked in intense competition during the early days of space flight.