China Prepares for Spacewalk
Future flights of China’s Shenzhou spaceship will include spacewalks – a prelude to rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit. This artist’s conception provides a cutaway view of the spacecraft’s modules, showing how the trio of Chinese astronauts would be positioned.
“The high cost of space transportation has been the biggest obstacle to the exploration of space and the utilization of space,” said COTS program deputy manager Valin Thorn of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, at the Space 2008 conference in San Diego earlier this month.
Three Chinese astronauts have been identified to be the part of the Shenzhou 7 three-day mission manned mission which will include China’s first space walk on September 25, 2008. The spacewalk will be one of the two afternoons in the mission.
The three astronauts are fighter pilots Zhai Zhigang, Liu Baiming and Jing Haipeng. Zhai Zhigang was an unsuccessful candidate for the previous two manned missions, but will be the one who carries out the 40-minute spacewalk. Preparations are done regarding major systems for the launching of the Shenzhou 7, including spacecraft testing, the space walk suits, an accompanying satellite for the flight, and the Long March 2F rocket.
Preparations and drills have been conducted, along with sea search and rescue teams to rescue the astronauts should an accident occur, with the capsule falling into the sea upon reentry. The Chinese spacecraft will carry a small satellite which will be released from the spacecraft, or released by the astronaut, which will broadcast the spacewalk live to beam footage to Earth. The released satellite will contain charge coupled device cameras (CCD), capturing images of the spacewalkers as they step out in space.
This is not the first manned mission for China into space. Their Shenzhou 5 mission launched Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei into a 14-orbit around Earth during a 21-hour flight, while the Shenzhou 6 mission was a five day flight with two astronauts. The Shenzhou spacecrafts are designed from Russia’s three-module Soyuz spacecraft, with modernization added by Chinese engineers:
· An orbital module has been included which will remain in space in order to carry out experiments, once the Chinese astronauts returns to Earth in the reentry module.
· Orbital module will be outfitted with solar arrays to supply it with power.
· The orbital module possibly will become the base for their space station, or even a docking target for the Chinese’s Space Agency’s future spacecraft.
China launches its second manned spacecraft Shenzhou-6 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province at 9:00 a.m. local time Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under Mars News, Mission History, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
