China sends its youngest crew of former fighter pilots into space
Before going into space, Jiang Xinlin, 35, was a tank driver and fighter pilot for the Chinese People's Liberation Army.. At the controls of the fighters that fly over the disputed islands of the South Seas, he logged more than 1,000 flight hours during a prodigious 10-year career in the air force.
Jiang fattened his resume this Thursday with his first space flight. He did it as a crew member of the Shenzhou-17 mission. The destination was the Tiangong station, which orbits about 380 kilometers above Earth.. Another young former Chinese Army pilot, Tang Shengjie (33 years old), was also on the ship.. Like his colleague Jiang, it was his first time in space.
Both pilots have been preparing for three years at an astronaut camp in Beijing, where, dressed in suits that weigh more than 120 kilos, they train inside a 10-meter-deep water tank that simulates weightlessness in space.
Leading the mission was another older pilot, Commander Tang Hongbo (48 years old), who holds the record of being the Chinese taikonaut (as astronauts are known in Beijing) with the shortest interval between space missions: two in a row. two years.
To the Moon in 2030
The ambitious space program of the Asian superpower, which plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030, continues to gain strength with the youngest team of astronauts in its history, starting a six-month mission in Tiangong.
In the northwest of the country, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, in the Gobi Desert, the Long March 2F rocket, carrying the ship carrying the three fighter pilots, was successfully fired. It was China's 12th manned mission to space.
The great space alliance between China and Russia: this is how they want to explore other habitable planets together
The thirty-somethings Jiang and Tang joined the third group of Chinese pilots converted into astronauts in 2020. The rigorous military profile – air force recruits – was broken when Gui Haichao, an aerospace engineer and researcher at Beihang University in Beijing, was the first Chinese civilian to join a mission beyond the Earth's atmosphere last May.. Gui and his two other mission companions, who formed the crew of Shenzhou-16, the predecessor to the current mission, will return to Earth on October 31.
For the selection process for the fourth group of astronauts, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) is looking for candidates with doctoral degrees in disciplines ranging from biology, physics and chemistry, to biomedical engineering and astronomy.. Also, for the first time, this group will be open to training foreign astronauts, as long as they are fluent in Mandarin, the working language in Tiangong.
Construction of the Chinese station began after the United States excluded Beijing from the International Space Station in 2011, largely due to concerns about the Chinese space program's ties to the military.. Completed at the end of last year and with an operational useful life of around 15 years, Tiangong now has three key modules: two research laboratories, Wentian and Meengtian, launched in 2022, and the Tianhe module, where the crew lives, launched into orbit in 2021.
This week, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the CMSA, revealed that the next steps would consist of further expanding the station, which is now T-shaped, but could have an expanded module to carry out more scientific research, and another to improve the facilities where the astronauts live, which would include a kind of “gym” so the team can exercise. In addition, according to the plan, the idea is to soon launch the Xuntian space telescope, which will orbit alongside the space station.
Lin also highlighted that the young crew of Shenzhou-17 “will continue to conduct experiments and embark on a spacewalk mission to repair solar panels that have been damaged by small space debris that impacted the station.”
The deputy director reiterated Beijing's intention to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 and the construction of a base on the lunar surface. “The goal of taking the Chinese to the Moon will be achieved as planned,” he said.. The world's second largest economy continues to accelerate its program and inject billions in an effort to catch up with space powers such as the United States and Russia.