China’s next Tiangong space station residents will be its youngest crew ever

Name: China’s Shenzhou 16 mission sends its first civilian astronaut into space
Uploaded: 2023-10-25T22:00:09.000Z
Duration: 2 min 22 s
Description: China’s Shenzhou 16 mission sends its first civilian astronaut into space

The three former PLA pilots, whose average age is 38, are set to begin six-month mission when Shenzhou 17 launches on Thursday

Mission will be a return visit for crew commander, who will help continue dozens of experiments and lead effort to patch station’s solar panels

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The Shenzhou 17 spaceship, mounted on a Long March-2F carrier rocket, is set for a Thursday launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China. Photo: Xinhua

Victoria Bela

Published: 6:00am, 26 Oct 2023

The youngest-ever crew of a Chinese space mission was set for launch on Thursday morning as they prepared to spend six months aboard the Tiangong space station.

The three former fighter pilots, whose average age is 38, were introduced at a press conference on Wednesday. The Shenzhou 17 mission is scheduled to launch at 11.14am from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, officials said.

Their spacecraft is then expected to orbit for nearly seven hours before autonomously docking at the station, which is in low-Earth orbit, about 380km (236 miles) above the Earth. The new group will be greeted by the Shenzhou 16 crew, who have been living on the station for nearly five months.

The Shenzhou 17 crew will be the third group to live and work on the station this year. They will stay until April when the crew of the Shenzhou 18 arrive to take over.

Mission commander Tang Hongbo, 48, was part of China’s historic Shenzhou 12 mission in 2021 when the first crew boarded Tiangong.

Tang would not only be the first crew member to live on the space station twice, he would also set a record as the Chinese astronaut “with the shortest interval between two missions”, said Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency.

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China’s Shenzhou 16 mission sends its first civilian astronaut into space

A native of central China’s Hunan province, Tang joined the country’s second batch of astronauts in 2010 after serving as a fighter pilot in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In November 2021, he was honoured with the “Heroic Astronaut” award for his contributions to China’s space programme.

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