Shenzhou 21 launches crew to Tiangong

The Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center sits deep in the Gobi Desert, and at 11:44 p.m. on 31 October 2025 its floodlit pad turned night into noon. A Long March 2F climbed away carrying commander Zhang Lu, a veteran of Shenzhou 15, and two rookies: flight engineer Wu Fei, who at 32 became the youngest Chinese astronaut ever to fly, and payload specialist Zhang Hongzhang, a researcher from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. Sharing their ride were four mice, two male and two female, the first mammal research subjects China had ever sent to orbit.

The spacecraft then did something no crewed Shenzhou had done. Instead of the usual six-and-a-half-hour chase, it executed a fast autonomous rendezvous and docked with Tiangong's Tianhe core module just three and a half hours after liftoff, at 3:22 a.m. Beijing time, the quickest docking in Shenzhou history. It was the 37th flight of China's human spaceflight program, and the crew settled in for a six-month expedition built around 27 new experiments spanning life science, space medicine, materials, fluid physics, and combustion.

Nobody aboard could know their spacecraft was about to become famous for a different reason. On 5 November, hours before the outgoing Shenzhou 20 crew was due to fly home, inspections revealed fine cracks in that capsule's window, the suspected work of orbital debris. Mission managers ruled the ship unsafe for reentry. On 14 November the Shenzhou 20 crew came home instead aboard the brand-new Shenzhou 21 capsule, the first time Chinese astronauts had ever landed in a different spacecraft than the one they launched in. Zhang Lu's crew stayed in orbit, temporarily without a lifeboat of their own.

The expedition stretched far past its plan. When the trio finally landed on 29 May 2026, riding the replacement Shenzhou 22 capsule to the Dongfeng landing site, they had logged 210 days in space, the longest single mission in Chinese history. A flight that began as routine crew rotation ended up touching three different spacecraft and proving that China's station program could absorb its first genuine in-orbit emergency.