The Taikonauts entered the Tianhe module about three hours after the successful docking
JIUQUAN /China/, October 16. /tass/. Three Chinese cosmonauts from the Shenzhou-13 manned spacecraft entered the main module of the PRC orbital station on Saturday and began the first operations for its maintenance and operation. This was reported by the Administration of the Manned Space Flight Program of China.
According to him, the Taikonauts entered the main module of the Tianhe at 09:58 Beijing time (04:58 Moscow time) - about three hours after the successful docking. Thus, the entire journey from the launch of Shenzhou-13 from the Jiuquan cosmodrome in northern China took them nine and a half hours.
As Huang Weifen, the general designer of the life support system of the manned space flight program, told the TASS correspondent earlier, the astronauts are placed at the station with the maximum possible comfort. They can constantly communicate with relatives and friends on Earth, watch TV shows. In addition, the Chinese National Space Administration provided them with a large amount of food, which includes a rich list of dishes.
The launch of Shenzhou-13 is the sixth mission for the construction of the PRC orbital station, it will complete the first stage of the project, during which key equipment is being tested. In 2022, China plans to carry out the work of the second stage, when the installation of space compartments will be carried out. To do this, the administration of the country's manned space flight program will send six more vehicles into orbit, two of them are the Wentian (Questions to the Sky) and Mengtian (Heavenly Dream Space Laboratory) modules, two more are manned, and the rest are cargo.
The Chinese station is located at an altitude of about 400 km and will serve for more than 10 years. It is designed for three people (up to six for a short time when the crew changes). The mass of the T-shaped complex, which has three docking nodes and a gateway for entering space, is 66 tons, the volume of compartments reaches 110 cubic meters. It is expected that the orbital object will work in 2022 and, as promised by the Chinese authorities, will be available for international projects.
Launch pad in the north of China
Jiuquan Cosmodrome is located at an altitude of 1 thousand meters above sea level, 200 km north of the city of the same name, it is located in an oasis, in the star city of Dongfeng ("East Wind") in the middle of the Badyn-Jaran desert, known for the highest (up to 500 m) fixed dunes in the world. This is the oldest and most spacious launch pad of the PRC with an extensive adjacent territory of the facility, the area of which reaches 2,800 sq. km. It was created with the assistance of Soviet specialists back in 1958. It is the only one of the four Chinese space harbors designed for manned missions. Over the past more than 60 years, over 200 satellites, 13 ships of the Shenzhou series, as well as the Tiangong-1 target module and the Tiangong-2 laboratory have been launched from here.
