Two Chinese astronauts carried out this Sunday the first tandem spacewalk for Chinese, to work on the new Chinese space station Tiangong, announced the Chinese space agency for manned flights. The crew, a trio of men, took off at the end of June from the Gobi Desert (northwest China). Their spacecraft was then docked at Tianhe, the only one of the three space station modules already in orbit, where they are to stay for three months, the longest manned space mission ever led by China.
They are tasked with continuing to build the station, and on Sunday morning the two of them stepped out into space together – a first in Chinese space history. The first, Liu Boming, was transported to the place where they are to work by a mechanical arm, while the other, Tang Hongbo, simply got out through an airlock. In particular, they must erect a panoramic camera outside the Tianhe module, and test the mechanical arm that will be used to transfer future modules from the station, and are expected to spend six to seven hours outside.
It is the first spacewalk for Chinese astronauts since that of Zhai Zhigang in 2008, which made China the third country to launch an astronaut into space, after the Soviet Union and the United States. United.