This week, two Chinese astronauts, Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong, completed a record-breaking spacewalk, lasting more than nine hours outside the Tiangong space station. The historic mission, which was carried out on Tuesday, surpassed the previous record by four minutes, which was set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001.
The astronauts, part of China’s Shenzhou-19 mission, wore Feitian spacesuits while conducting several essential tasks outside the station. These included installing space-debris protection devices to safeguard the station. According to the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, the astronauts successfully completed all their planned tasks and expressed excitement over their achievement.
Since the Soviet Union’s first spacewalk in 1965, the practice has remained significant to space exploration with the involvement of Russia and US conducting hundreds of missions, mainly outside of the International Space Station, but China only started making spacewalks since 2008.
This success is part of China’s growing space ambitions, including its recent successes, like landing its first rover on Mars in 2021 and retrieving rock samples from the far side of the moon earlier this year. In the future, China plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, aiming to challenge NASA’s Artemis program for lunar supremacy.
