Here we go again. Three Chinese astronauts are functionally stranded at the Tiangong space station after the apparent space debris impact with the Shenzhou-20 ship. The China Manned Mission Space Agency (CMSA) has not yet commented on its return.
What we know. Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie were due to return to Earth on November 5. Its return flight was postponed to further examine the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft for the possible impact of small fragments of space debris while it was docked with the Chinese station.
The three crew members they are safe. The damage to the capsule was discovered “during final checks prior to re-entry.” But the relief crew had already arrived, meaning there are two ships (Shenzhou-20 and Shenzhou-21) and six astronauts aboard a station designed for three.
The CMSA focuses its investigations on the integrity of the ship’s heat shield and parachute systems. A failure in any of these elements during the ship’s atmospheric reentry could be catastrophic.
What we don’t know. The CMSA is not a space agency counterpart to NASA and ESA, but a unit of the Chinese army that reports to the military command. Your communications are, consequently, limited. We do not know the extent of the damage to the ship or if it was really due to the impact of space debris.
There is still no scheduled date for his return. It will depend on whether the ship is considered safe or the level of risks that the CMSA is willing to take. Assuming the ship is damaged, there are three possible options.
The three options. The riskiest plan would be to attempt an in-orbit repair with a spacewalk. Commander Chen Dong is the Chinese astronaut with the most hours of extravehicular activity, but certifying a heat shield as “safe” after an impact is something totally new.
If the CMSA decides to sacrifice the ship, then two other alternatives are open: the fast one and the slow one. The quick one would be to use the relief ship (Shenzhou-21) as a lifeboat for the three crew members of the Shenzhou-20. The problem is that the seats are molded to the body of each astronaut, so this option would require disassembling the seats of both spacecraft and exchanging them, a complex operation that has never been done in orbit.
The slow option would be to prepare the next ship (Shenzhou-22) on the ground for an “emergency service”, launching it empty to the Chinese space station as happened with the Russian Soyuz MS-23 in 2023. It is the safest option, but also the slowest and most expensive to bring back the astronauts.
Three times in three years. This is the first time that China has gone through a situation like this, but the third time in three years in which a crew is left in orbit without a clear return ticket.
Soyuz MS-22 lost in spurts coolant liquid after the impact of a micrometeorite while it was docked with the International Space Station, which forced Russia to send the empty Soyuz MS-23 capsule to bring back the cosmonauts.
In 2024, the two crew members of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft They became part of the permanent crew of the International Space Station waiting for a SpaceX Crew Dragon ship to arrive with two empty seats for their return. On this occasion, space junk had no nothing to see.
Image | CMSA
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