Astronauts from China’s Shenzhou-18 mission have returned to Earth after six months in space.
The Shenzhou-18 spacecraft’s return capsule—carrying three “taikonauts”—successfully touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 1:24 a.m. Beijing time on Monday, November 4, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement.
At 2:15 a.m. Beijing time, the taikonauts—Ye Guangfu, Li Cong and Li Guangsu—all exited the return capsule safely, according to the CMSA.
An on-site medical team determined that the crew are in good health after an initial assessment, with the CMSA declaring that the mission was a “success.” The taikonauts had spent a total of 192 days in orbit above the Earth aboard China’s Tiangong space station.
Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images
The crew later arrived in Beijing by plane on Monday after returning from the space station, CGTN, the English-language news channel of state-run China Global Television Network, reported. The crew will undergo a period of medical quarantine and a comprehensive health check-up before meeting with the press in Beijing.
The Shenzhou-18 spacecraft launched from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center with the three crew members aboard on April 25, 2024. It later docked with Tianhe, the core module and the first to launch of the Tiangong space station.
The Tiangong space station—meaning “Heavenly Palace” in Mandarin—is China’s first long-term, modular space station.
Operational since 2021, Tiangong orbits Earth at altitudes of up to 280 miles, serving as a research outpost for Chinese and international scientific experiments related to various research fields.
Designed with three main modules—Tianhe (the core module) and two laboratory modules, Wentian and Mengtian—Tiangong is expected to be in use for at least a decade.
During the latest mission, the crew completed a number of tasks, including conducting two spacewalks to install space debris protection devices for Tiangong. One of these spacewalks broke a national record for length of time outside the station. Other completed tasks involved the maintenance and repair of the space station’s equipment.
At the same time, with the close cooperation of researchers on the ground, the crew also completed a large number of space science experiments in the fields of microgravity physics, space material science, space life science, aerospace medicine and aerospace technology, among others.
Ye Guangfu has now also broken the record for residence time in orbit for Chinese astronauts, becoming the first taikonaut to have accumulated more than one year of flight time.
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