China launches Shenzhou-22 mission to Tiangong space station

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By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s Shenzhou-22 mission blasted off on Tuesday as the country looks to plug safety risks to its crewed spaceflight program and space station after a vessel was damaged in orbit earlier this month.

The Shenzhou-22 spacecraft took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 12:11 p.m. (0411 GMT), according to a livestream on state-owned broadcaster CCTV.

The spacecraft will travel to China’s permanently inhabited Tiangong space station, where three astronauts currently reside with no flightworthy vessel that could return them to Earth in the event of an emergency.

On November 5, the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was meant to return a trio of Chinese astronauts back to Earth but was deemed unfit to fly after sustaining suspected debris damage while docked at Tiangong. 

This forced China’s space authorities to deploy the only remaining flightworthy vessel, the Shenzhou-21, which had just arrived at the space station in late October.

With the departure of Shenzhou-21 six months before schedule, Tiangong’s three resident astronauts were left without a spacecraft, a safety risk the arrival of Shenzhou-22 will remove. 

China’s quick and methodical response to this emergency contrasts with that of the United States, which had to deal with two NASA astronauts getting stuck aboard the International Space Station for nine months due to issues with the propulsion system of the vessel carrying them. 

Both countries are closely studying each other’s operational protocols and space technologies as they race to land an astronaut on the moon before or by 2030.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Saad Sayeed)