China Launches Wentian Module in Major Space Station Expansion
Update: Wentian docked with the space station early Monday morning Beijing time after a 13-hour flight.
China launched the 23-metric ton Wentian module on Sunday as the first step in expanding the nation’s first permanent space station.
The 17.9 meter long is headed for a docking with the station’s Tianhe core module that is currently occupied by the Shenzhou-14 crew of Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe.
Wentian includes laboratory equipment for life sciences, biotechnology and variable gravity experiments. The module also has 22 external mounting devices that will allow for the attachment of unpressurized experiments. Wentian features a robotic arm that is half the size as the one mounted on the outside of the Tianhe core module.
Wentian includes three sleeping berths, a kitchen and a toilet to accommodate the expansion of the station’s full-time complement from three to six taikonauts. The module will provide additional propulsion, control and avionics to back up the Tianhe core. Wentian is powered by two solar panels.
China will launch the Mengtian laboratory module in October to complete initial assembly of the space station. Mengtian is similar in size and design to Wentian.
35 responses to “China Launches Wentian Module in Major Space Station Expansion”
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skylab fallling hat on…
More like warm the Aegis systems up, there is incoming…
yeah…
I can’t believe after the last time, they did not install the most basic retro propulsion option to allow for controlled reentry.
As an “undeveloped” nation they shouldn’t be held to the same standards as the developed nations. Besides, the Chinese see the rest of world as occupied by barbarians so why would they care where it impacts…
You know, that sounds like a very likely explanation as to why they’re doing this. It’s not a huge performance hit to allow for a guided or at least bounded reentry.
the PRC is a near perfect “red” state. “everything” is for the group and individual or small subset affects are simply mitigated by “whats good for the group and its social structure”
the odds are the rocket will not impact China if it does impact China the odds that people will be killed are low and the odds that those people will matter is even lower still..
one sees this all the time over there. and in places like Mississippi 🙂 AND in Texas. the kids in Uvalde. no big deal more important that the group have its assault weapons
I actually live in Uvalde less that a mile away from the school. I know folks who lost relatives there… Not Cool.
My condolences. You and your community have a rough row to hoe dealing with that disaster. What horror.
its where the GOP has been taking the state for a long time. there was a time when cops in the state ran to the guns (Texas tower shootings) today the rignt wing runs from them.
Well the gun nuts today say that an AR-15 will deter the government from stopping a shooter from doing what he pleases. They are correct on that assessment.
Deter at least some government employees anyway. Pity none of the parents who showed up and tried to get in thought to bring one.
That’s the problem with using guns to solve social problems. There’s never enough guns. The more guns you throw into the system, the more the individual units lose track of the balance of their problem solving skills and default to the gun as a means of meeting their outlandish life fantasies which means you need more guns on hand in trained hands to stop a shooter looking go to use his guns to live his life. And of course most of the times, those hands are not trained. Arming society to the teeth is not the solution.
The value of guns in the hands of people that can use them for defense has a parallel in nuclear weapons in the hands of countries that can use them. The deterrence matters far more than the usage.
Arming society to the teeth is not the solution any more than nukes for all countries. There needs to be enough probability that criminals will be opposed that they will avoid the area. Just as a nuclear armed country does not often face a war of annihilation. The risks are just too high.
When a shooter, or a war goes active, then all the rules are changed. Absent nukes, I suspect Russia would have received somewhat more than sanctions.
I am on different sides at different times on this issue. I choose not to be disarmed personally, though i also don’t choose to go vigilante. Both extreme sides of the argument I find embarrassing in naiveté. .
There was a time when TX cops weren’t union pukes too. I don’t think the Uvalde school district cops are “right-wing.” In the clutch, they seemed to be standard-issue union drones. Many of the parents seemed to be right-wing, though – you know, self-reliant and with initiative. Too bad the cops/drones stopped them from going in.
no its more red state values
Dithering while people die and waiting for command guidance from on-high are blue state values.
no. thats exactly what they did at Uvalde. dithered and its red the feds came in and like gods own thunder ended it
no its not cool… its red state incompetence. the guy outgunned them and they got scared. and stayed scared until the feds showed up. and took him down like gods own thunder.
red states need federal supervision. now all they are doing is from the Gov on down is lying about it
The GOP can’t fight wars, can’t fight a virus, can’t be “good guys with guns”, can’t balance a budget. They’re the party of can’t do.
they have gone full circle with this. and now they are into complete incompetence because intellectual integrity means more than general integrity.
they wont talk to people who do not 100 percent tow the line and the people who do are generally incompetent by definition. AND so far they have been able to lie their way out of issues.
this seems to have let greggy down …and it will come out that greg probably knew on the day he was talking abo0ut the brave first responders that they were not so brave (or brave Sir Robin) ….
the “max” 🙂 part of this is that it seems to have let trump down
Trump came close to killing Mike Pence or at least having a gun battle of epic proportions on the capital step….and had that happen well Trump would have kited the folks who did the storming of hte capital and declared marshal law and then we would be in it
my guess is that the music is slowly ending
You live a rich and full fantasy life, Sir.
sleeper issue is climate change. cue Al Gore 🙂
It’s another issue the extremes of either party can’t really deal with. California can’t add just a few gas plants or keep the nukes going to balance out what would be a great California power system otherwise, and Texas can’t admit that extreme weather events are regular now and won’t force their power companies to invest in the 1 in 600 daily weather excursions, so they have to ask people to self brownout and secretly take control of peoples thermostats in a very Soviet attempt to lower electrical load. But running electrical grids in real world weather can be added to another GOP “can’t do”.
there is some of that, but look nuclear power is a dead end until the storage issue is addressed. do you want an old reactor buried in your back yard 🙂
the state of Texas is run by a bunch of ideological nuts. Dan Patrick is a good example but Greggy is no peach and that extends deep in the GOP. as for power. stupid people who vote for these clowns, let them sweat.
I have now 140KW of solar power that is just wonderful. and every day REliant ups its “share power cost” the smile on my face and the payback gets greater. its actually very strange for me. I have three 100KW diesel or NG generators on the farm all linked by GPS to the solar arrays and the batteries.
as it stands right now. I can burn natural gas on the gens and sell power back to the utility and make about 300 USD a day on their triple bonus program…
but most rural Texans are to stupid and caught up in right wing propaganda (and to poor thanks to GOP economics) to move on this.
what you think that they are going to think it through? Texas is with GOP leadership stuck on stupid maybe Beto will change this (I am not hopeful but am giving him a lot of money 🙂 its what I owe the state 🙂
The advantage of inheriting a lot of land and wealth… All you need is a few serfs to go with it.
my 12 year old would love to be queen 🙂
There would be no storage issue if we simply reprocessed all the waste, but the non-proliferationistas refuse to allow that. That’s a choice, not a necessity.
The rate of poverty in a given state has less to do with its ruling party than it does with its distance from the U.S.-Mexico border. Here’s a plot of the current stats. Notice where the below-national-average-poverty states are. Notice where the above-national-average-poverty states are. CA gets the big dot because it has the most people below the poverty line in absolute numbers. New York defies the pattern somewhat because it is still a mecca for poor illegals not all of whom come in via the Mexican border.
“Beto,” the shanty-Irish fake Latino, isn’t going to change anything in TX as he’s not going to get elected. I’m glad you sent him money though. Keeps you from doing anything consequentially awful with it instead.
As Peter Zeihan said about CA, “It’s a place where it’s still legal to consume power, but not to make it.”
Extreme weather events are not increasing. The solar and wind systems in TX are the same as the ones here in CA. But CA is not subject to below-zero weather and widespread snow even in bad years. It’s just subject to impacted left-wing policy idiocy and oodles of power outages that the left-wing media find too unremarkable to note. The Great TX Blackout was more an indication that “alternative” energy still lacks a lot of being ready for prime time. Anyway, it’s hardly as though blue states have some patent of immunity to mass power outages. Most of those in the last 20 years have been well east of the Mississippi.
Sorry, but I lived in Texas in the 1980’s I think for all the time I lived there temps reached 100 F once maybe twice. It was a major event for the Ft Worth Dallas Metroplex. Everyone talked about it during the day it happened. High 80’s was considered hot, and the 90’s were a heatwave.
That is the left’s intellectual failing. They consume but don’t produce. The GOP’s failure is that they also consume, but outsource the production. They don’t embrace doing the work themselves. They’re only slightly better on that front however they’re just as lazy.
Climate change is not a sleeper issue, it’s a sleep-inducing issue. The left and the Dems have been crying ‘Wolf!’ on that so long they’ve got no credibility left.
The GOP did fine fighting wars – it just messed up the aftermath by worrying about what the Dems would say if we actually tried seriously to fix any of the godawful places we had to go into. Even so, Biden messed up the endgame in Afghanistan far worse.
Trump fought the virus pretty well. Biden and blue state governors were the botchmeisters and the petty tyrants. They couldn’t even properly distribute the vaccines Trump had made possible. Gov. Hairgel, out here, didn’t let loose of any until he faced a recall.
New vaccines against new variants haven’t exactly been a priority either. It’s taken three times as long to get even one of those as it did the Trump admin to get three against the original strain.
“Can’t balance a budget?” Yeah, like your side ever did that without a gun to their heads.
The GOP has, too often, been the ‘Party of won’t do.’ I think that’s about to change.
It’s government employee incompetence and cowardice. The locals and one set of feds vs. a second set of feds. It’s the blue states which need federal supervision. Once the current DC regime is gone I think they’re going to get it too – good and hard.
More like a near-perfect blue state. I should know, I live in one.
I can.