China's Shenzhou 9 spacecraft successfully completed a manual
docking procedure with its orbiting space lab Tiangong-1 on 24
June. It was the first manual docking of China's space
The Shenzhou 9 spacecraft started the day joined to Tiangong-1,
the two having achieved an automated rendez-vous on 18 June.
The three astronauts aboard, Jing Haipeng, the mission
commander, Liu Wang and Liu Yang entered into Shenzhou 9 the
morning of 24 June Beijing time, separated from Tiangong-1 and
moved to a distance of 400 metres. At 12.48 Beijing time Liu Wang
took the controls of Shenzhou 9 and operated the parallel
moving and attitude adjusting hand lever to control the spaceship
to approach the lab from the berthing point distance of 140
After a series of procedures of capturing, buffering and
correction, pulling back and locking the Shenzhou 9 spaceship and
Tiangong 1 were connected together once more. The process was
monitored by fellow astronauts Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang. The
process completed at 12.55 Beijing time.
The manual docking procedure took just 7 minutes, faster than
the automatic rendez-vous. China has now demonstrated both
automatic and manual docking procedures -- technology and
experience that will be important for China's ambitious space
Tiangong-1 and the attached Shenzhou 9 craft are orbiting
Earth at approximately 28,000 km per hour.
Zhou Jianping, chief engineer of China's manned space program,
said "The automated docking and manual docking are both essential
and they serve as a backup for each other." He added
that China has fully grasped space travel, space walk and
space rendezvous and docking technologies that are essential to
building a space station.
Wu Ping, a spokeswoman for China's manned space program, said
the manual space docking was "a complete success" and that the
astronauts had re-entered the space lab module to continue their
scientific experiments. The three astronauts have
almost completed the major tasks they set out to achieve
and will return to Earth within a week, advised Wu Ping.
Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011, and within a month of being placed
in orbit it was joined by the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft. On 16 June
Shenzhou 9 launched and docked
automatically on 18 June with Tiangong-1, the first human
spaceflight docking of China's space program.
China plans to develop Tiangong into a space station over the
next few years -- the ability to launch crew and cargo to the
orbiter is therefore a key technological milestone in the process.
The Shenzhou-10 mission is planned for 2013.
China outlined its key
plans for space in a paper published in December 2011. The
plans include developing new Long March rockets and
developing BeiDou, the Chinese version of GPS. An
additional launch site, Hainan, is currently under
construction and will complement the Jiuquan spaceport in the
Gobi Desert, used to launch the current mission.
China also annouced, in two sections of the paper entitled
"Human spaceflight" and "Deep-space exploration", that "China
will conduct studies on the preliminary plan for a human lunar
The Deep Space Exploration section of the paper states that
"China will conduct special project demonstration in deep-space
exploration, and push forward its exploration of planets, asteroids
and the sun of the solar system".