{"id":52989,"date":"2021-06-20T04:10:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-20T04:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pr.asianetpakistan.com\/?p=75336"},"modified":"2021-06-20T04:10:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-20T04:10:20","slug":"cgtn-shenzhou-12-astronauts-become-first-chinese-to-enter-a-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lebanonnewsgazette.com\/cgtn-shenzhou-12-astronauts-become-first-chinese-to-enter-a-space-station\/","title":{"rendered":"CGTN: Shenzhou-12 astronauts become first Chinese to enter a space station"},"content":{"rendered":"
BEIJING, June 19, 2021 \/PRNewswire\/ —\u00a0Three Chinese astronauts entered their country’s space station during the Shenzhou-12 mission, ending the history of no Chinese in space stations.<\/p>\n
The trio, Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, entered the space station’s core module “Tianhe” from the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft launched on Thursday, according to the China Manned Space Engineering Office.<\/p>\n
This came more than 20 years after the International Space Station (ISS) was launched, which does not allow Chinese astronauts to be onboard because of a U.S. law banning the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from working with their Chinese counterparts.<\/p>\n
As the ISS is retiring and Russia has decided to pull from the project, China has stood out to build a new space station and is inviting global cooperation.<\/p>\n
The China space station, orbiting the Earth at a height of about 400 kilometers, is still under construction, as eight more missions including three manned ones are still being prepared.<\/p>\n
Currently the station is composed of a core module named Tianhe, a supply ship Tianzhou-2 and the Shenzhou-12, which docked with the space station less than three hours before the entering.<\/p>\n
Astronaut, cosmonaut or taikonaut?<\/b><\/p>\n
Some Chinese are so proud of the latest achievements that they revived the topic of how to name people in space.<\/p>\n
The naming problem emerged in the Cold War, when Soviet Union named their space heroes “cosmonauts” while the U.S. called theirs “astronaut.”<\/p>\n
Later, the word “taikonaut” was coined using the Mandarin equivalent of the word space \u2013 taikong \u2013 and the common suffix “-naut”.<\/p>\n
Oxford and Longman dictionaries listed the word taikonaut and said it means a Chinese astronaut.<\/p>\n
The next steps<\/b><\/p>\n
Now the three astronauts are unpacking the supplies on Tianzhou-2, setting up Wi-Fi connections and other equipment on the space station.<\/p>\n
They will live in the station for at least three months and conduct various technology test and science experiments, during which spacewalks involving robot arms will also be performed.<\/p>\n