Three Chinese astronauts just made a daring escape from a damaged spacecraft, only to leave their replacements in a cosmic pickle, as the Daily Mail reports.
Three brave souls from the Shenzhou-20 mission, stranded for nine days on the Tiangong space station due to a busted capsule, finally touched down in the Gobi Desert, but their return has trapped the incoming Shenzhou-21 crew in orbit with no ride home.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of this space saga: the Shenzhou-20 team -- Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie -- were set to return earlier this month after a six-month stint in orbit.
Their spacecraft took a hit from what’s likely space debris, leaving tiny cracks in the window and a nasty mark on the hull, making it too risky for a trip back to Earth.
Originally planned to head home on their own vessel, the crew found themselves stuck, staring at a capsule that couldn’t fly while orbiting hundreds of miles above us.
Space junk, traveling at a mind-boggling 17,000 mph in low Earth orbit, is the suspected culprit -- yet another reminder that the cosmos is a cluttered mess with over half a million untracked bits floating around, per NASA estimates.
Following strict safety rules, the Shenzhou-20 astronauts had to ditch their damaged ride and commandeer the Shenzhou-21 capsule, which had just arrived with a fresh crew on Oct. 31.
They undocked from Tiangong on Thursday, leaving their broken spacecraft behind to conduct experiments in orbit, and landed safely in northern China around 3:20 a.m. local time on Friday.
Emerging in good health, the trio waved to recovery teams and even boasted about squeezing in extra science work with their replacements before blasting off -- talk about making the most of a bad situation.
Here’s the rub. Using the Shenzhou-21 capsule to get home means the new team -- Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang -- now has no emergency exit if things go south during their six-month mission.
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) insists a backup plan is in place, noting that the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will launch “at an appropriate time” to potentially rescue or replace the current crew, though no firm date has been locked in.
“Shenzhou-22 and the Long March 2F [launcher] were already on standby. This is our rolling backup mechanism,” said aerospace expert Yu Jun to his millions of Weibo followers, sounding optimistic about a swift resolution.
Let’s not kid ourselves. While Yu Jun’s confidence is nice, this mess highlights how space debris is a ticking time bomb, with the U.S. tracking nearly 19,000 pieces and countless smaller hazards ready to punch holes in anything up there.
This isn’t just China’s problem; it echoes the nearly year-long nightmare of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, stranded earlier this year due to mechanical woes, proving that even the best-laid plans can crumble in orbit.
CMSA’s statement that “the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft does not meet the requirements for the astronauts' safe return and will remain in orbit to continue relevant experiments,” as reported by Xinhua, feels like a polite way of saying they’ve got a multi-million-dollar paperweight floating in space -- hardly reassuring when lives are on the line.
