With the successful launch of the Long March 5B rocket today, China's manned spaceflight enterprise has entered a new phase.
At a press conference following the successful launch, Ji Qiming, assistant to the director of China's Manned Space Engineering Office, announced that China will officially build its own space station around 2022.
According to Ji Qiming, according to the plan, the Chinese space station will be built around 2022, with 12 missions planned (this Long March 5B is the first, with 11 more launch events to follow).
After the mission, China will also launch the Sky and Core Module, the Questioning Sky Experiment Module and the Dreaming Sky Experiment Module, and carry out in-orbit assembly and construction of the basic configuration of the space station.
During this period, China plans to launch four Shenzhou manned spacecraft and four Tianzhou cargo spacecraft for crew rotation and cargo replenishment.
In the future, not only the Long March 5B rocket but also the Long March 2F manned carrier rocket and the Long March 7 carrier rocket will carry out launch missions, the frequency, and complexity of which will be greatly increased.
Before China, the former Soviet Union and the United States built the Mir space station and the International Space Station (ISS) in space, respectively.
Among them, the United States-led ISS had an orbital mass of more than 400 tons, compared with about 60 tons after the launch of China's three modules, docking two manned spacecraft and one cargo spacecraft, adding up to more than 90 tons, still much smaller than the space station.
However, the chief designer of China's manned space engineering, Academician Zhou Jianping, said that the scale is determined by demand and that the Chinese space station has fully considered the needs of scientists during the demonstration and research and development process, which is closely related to scientific development so that the scale can meet the needs of space science research.
He also mentioned that the Chinese space station is still resiliently expandable, leaving room for future development. While the need for more scientific research continues to emerge, China's space stations can still meet the demand through on-orbit maintenance, on-orbit technology upgrades, and more.
"We can expand the space station body, which is currently three pods, to four pods, or even six pods." He claimed.
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