An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home.
A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.
Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 5, officials discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a cracked window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk.
Officials made the discovery during a crew handover on the station, a few days after the arrival of a fresh three-person crew and just before the departure of three astronauts who had been in orbit since April. After engineers deemed the damaged Shenzhou 20 ship unsafe, Chinese space officials decided to send the outgoing crew back to Earth on the unblemished Shenzhou 21 spacecraft.
Shenzhou 21 successfully landed with its three occupants on November 14, but that still left three astronauts on the Tiangong station without a safe return craft. On the ground at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s remote Gobi Desert, technicians scrambled to ready a standby rocket and ship for launch as soon as possible.
A remarkable turnaround
“The mission command swiftly activated its contingency plan,” the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement. “The entire project team responded calmly and scientifically, with participating research and testing units working collaboratively to overcome challenges.”