Shenzhou

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Diagram showing the structure of a Shenzhou spaceship
Recovered landing capsule from the Shenzhou 5 mission

Shenzhou ( Chinese  神舟 , Pinyin shénzhōu  - "magic ship, god ship") is the name for the first manned Chinese spaceship and the underlying program of the office for manned space travel .

Overview

Although China has been developing launch vehicles since the 1950s, the field of manned spaceflight has long been limited to drawing up plans. It was not until Project 921-1 in 1992 that China began to translate theory into practice.

In order to justify the enormous costs of the manned space program to the population, the political leadership of the project, i.e. General Ding Henggao (丁 衡 高, * 1931) and his two deputies, Lieutenant General Shen Rongjun (沈 荣 骏, * 1936) and Liu Jiyuan (刘 纪元), the requirement for China's first spaceship not to simply recreate Gagarin's Vostok capsule or the Soyuz TM - the most modern Soviet spaceship at the time - but to surpass the Soviet Union or Russia in a kind of leap innovation . Wang Yongzhi (王永志, * 1932), the technical director of the manned space program, was of the same opinion. Hence, the Shenzhou spaceships, although very similar to the Soyuz spaceship , are larger than their Russian counterparts in almost all dimensions. The total mass of the Shenzhou spaceship is about 7.8 tons, the total length is 8.65 meters, but like the Soyuz, it is intended for a crew of three.

The spacecraft consists of three modules, the orbital module as the front part, the return capsule as the middle and the service module as the rear part. This design was not without controversy. About half of the engineers involved in pre-planning the project in 1992 advocated a two-component spaceship, without the orbital module, as it would be easier to build and safer. In the end, the then Ministry of Aerospace Industry, a predecessor organization of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation , sent the respected aerospace engineer Ren Xinmin as arbitrator, who, after a certain training period, made the decision in favor of the variant with three modules.

The decisive factor here was the coupling system at the front end of the orbital module. Even if the funds for the manned space program were only released gradually, the plan submitted to the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China and approved on September 21, 1992 already mentioned a space laboratory and later a space station, for which reason a coupling mechanism was indispensable and an additional cabin (the orbital module) was desirable. If you had initially only built a simple spaceship for orbiting the earth, you would have had to design another spaceship again afterwards in a lengthy and expensive development process.

Unlike the Soyuz TM, where the entire spaceship leaves orbit on its return to Earth, the orbital module and the service module are then separated and burn up in the atmosphere, the Shenzhou spaceships detach from the orbital module while in orbit and only then return back to earth. In this way, the orbital module equipped with experiments can be used for at least half a year (in practice much longer). From the beginning, this was intended as a first step towards a space laboratory to find out which experiments could be carried out in orbit and what was not suitable for this. At the same time, this enabled a group of researchers to come together at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who specialized in experiments in weightlessness and who were able to gain initial experience with the orbital module in order to then better design their apparatus for the actual space laboratory.

It was agreed that the Chinese Academy of Space Technology should build the orbital module and the return capsule of the spacecraft, while the Shanghai Academy of Space Technology should build the service module. The Academy for Space Technology in Beijing was responsible for project management and final assembly. The chief designer of the spaceship was Qi Faren (戚 发轫, * 1933), director of the Academy for Space Technology since 1983 and until then, in addition to his administrative tasks, development manager for the communications satellite Dong Fang Hong 3 . The Shuguang spaceship , in which Qi Faren was responsible for the development of the pressurized cabin at the time, never got beyond a model made of wood and cardboard in the early 1970s; In 1992, engineers not only had to design the spaceship without prior experience, but also the facilities to manufacture it. First of all, the Academy for Space Technology in Beijing built a final assembly complex where the individual system components could be integrated and tested, also known as "AIT" because of the English name Assembly, Integration and Test . The largest vacuum chamber in Asia at the time was installed there , a laboratory to check the electromagnetic compatibility of the components and a large vibrating table to simulate the vibrations at startup.

On November 19, 1999, Shenzhou 1 took off on its first unmanned test flight with the CZ-2F launch vehicle from the Jiuquan spaceport in China . With the successful start of Shenzhou 5 , China became the third nation, after Russia and the USA , to maintain its own infrastructure for manned space flights. With the Shenzhou 6 mission in October 2005, two Chinese space travelers were in space for the first time for a long time.

The Shenzhou 12 spaceship for the first flight to the China Space Station underwent initial tests in March 2020 in the Beijing Final Assembly Hall of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology. Since special security requirements were in place in Beijing at the time due to the COVID-19 pandemic , dedicated lines were switched to the Chinese astronaut training center so that remote measurements can be carried out from there. This made it possible to reduce the number of people in the hall by 1/3, and since the engineers no longer had to commute between the individual buildings, the time required for the tests was also reduced. At the end of July 2020, the Changzheng 2F launch vehicle intended for the mission was half assembled in the factory 211 of the Hauptstätdtischen Raumflugkörper GmbH in Beijing (a subsidiary of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology ).

Previous missions

Web links

Commons : Shenzhou  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the early 2000s, each Shenzhou mission, excluding the development costs for the spaceship itself, cost several hundred million yuan. A large bowl of beef noodle soup, the construction worker's staple food, cost 3.00 to 3.50 yuan at the time.
  2. ↑ Mark Wade: Shenzhou RV in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)
  3. ↑ 朱增泉: 中国 飞船 - 中国 载人 航天 工程 总设计师 王永志 访谈 录. In: people.com.cn. October 17, 2003, accessed October 2, 2019 (Chinese).
  4. ↑ 周 雁: 神舟 二十 载 问 天 不 停歇. In: cmse.gov.cn. January 10, 2020, accessed January 15, 2020 (Chinese).
  5. ↑ 代 振 莹: 神舟 十二 号 、 天 舟 二号 、 新一代 载人 飞船 试验 船 、 空间站 有 新 进展. In: m.thepaper.cn. March 26, 2020, accessed March 27, 2020 (Chinese).
  6. ↑ 神舟 12 号 飞船 座驾 ： 长征 二号 F 火箭 总装 现场 曝光. In: tech.sina.com.cn. July 30, 2020, accessed July 30, 2020 (Chinese).
Manned spaceships


In use:

Soyuz  | Shenzhou

In testing:

Crew Dragon  | CST-100  | New Shepard  | SpaceShipTwo  | Orion  | Chinese multipurpose spaceship

In development:

Gaganyaan  | Starship  | Federazija  | Dream chaser

Retired:

Vostok  | Mercury  | Vozhod  | Gemini  | Apollo  | Space Shuttle  | SpaceShipOne

No manned operation:

TKS  | Buran

In each case arranged according to the (planned) date of the first manned flight above 100 km