On April 22, a Long March 5B rocket was rolled out at the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan. Encased in the payload fairing on top of the rocket is the 16.6-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter Tianhe core module along with a docking hub.
CBC Canada is reporting that the launch could come as early as Thursday night if all goes as planned. If so, the launch will be the first of 11 planned missions aimed at completing the space station by the end of 2022.
Tianhe, or “Heavenly Harmony” is planned to be inserted directly into a low Earth orbit with an apogee of around 370 kilometers and inclined by 41 degrees.
When completed, the space station will consist of three modules and weigh about 66 tons, a fraction the size of the International Space Station (ISS), which will weigh about 450 tons when completed.
Tianhe’s main module will initially be about the size of the American Skylab space station of the 1970s and the former Soviet/Russian Mir, which operated for more than 14 years after launching in 1986.
China's Tianhe, the core module of its new space station; and the USSR's DOS-7 (Mir), core module of its 1980s space station, for comparison pic.twitter.com/MQO9lN1iGC
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 26, 2021
Phys.org is reporting the Tianhe will have a docking port and will also be able to connect with a powerful Chinese space satellite. Theoretically, it could be expanded with more modules.
“China, in a sense, is trying to catch up with capabilities that other space powers that have already done,” says space analyst Laura Forczyk, per NewScientist. “One of the things that helps China here is that their government is not democratic, so there isn’t the infighting that we have in the US about what the priorities are and how to fund them.”
The China National Space Administration has already selected several experiments to be run onboard the CSS, including work with ultracold atoms to research quantum mechanics, materials science research, and work on medicine in microgravity.
