Shenzhou 20 launches crew to Tiangong

At 5:17 p.m. Beijing time on 24 April 2025, a Long March 2F rose from the Gobi Desert at Jiuquan, the same steppe where China's human spaceflight story began. The date was no accident: it was the tenth national Space Day, marking 55 years to the day since Dongfanghong-1, China's first satellite, reached orbit in 1970. Aboard sat commander Chen Dong, making his third flight, alongside rookies Chen Zhongrui, a former fighter pilot, and Wang Jie, an engineer, both from the astronaut class selected in 2020.

About six and a half hours after liftoff, Shenzhou 20 docked at the radial port of Tiangong's Tianhe core module, and the crew floated in to relieve Shenzhou 19. By 2025 this rhythm, two crewed launches a year, handovers in orbit, a permanently staffed Chinese station, had become so reliable it barely made headlines. The crew settled in for six months of spacewalks to install debris shielding and a science program that included China's first space experiment on planarian flatworms, studying regeneration alongside zebrafish and streptomyces cultures.

The drama came at the end. On 5 November 2025, hours before the scheduled return, inspections found a small crack in a window of Shenzhou 20's reentry capsule, most likely from a space debris strike. China judged the spacecraft unsafe for crew. In an unprecedented swap, Chen Dong's crew came home on 14 November aboard the newer Shenzhou 21 spacecraft, landing safely at Dongfeng, while their successors were left temporarily without a lifeboat until the uncrewed Shenzhou 22 launched on 25 November.

What began as a routine rotation ended as a 204-day flight, the longest Chinese crewed mission to date, and made Chen Dong the first Chinese astronaut to pass 400 cumulative days in space. The wounded Shenzhou 20 capsule was eventually brought back uncrewed in January 2026 for engineers to study. The mission became a case study in both the maturity of China's station operations and the growing menace of orbital debris to every crew in orbit.