China’s first manual space docking successful

It means China has completely grasped space rendezvous and docking technologies and the country is fully capable of transporting humans and cargo to an orbiter in space, which is essential for building a space station in 2020.
Astronaut Liu Wang, assisted by his teammates Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang, controlled the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft to dock with the Tiangong-1 space lab module at 12:48 pm, which were reconnected about seven minutes later.
About one and a half hours before the docking, Shenzhou-9 parted from Tiangong-1 to a berth point 400 metres away from the module.
To leave room for adjustments, engineers set up four berth points for the spaceship on the same orbit 5 km, 400 metres, 140 metres and 30 metres away from the orbiting lab.
As highly sophisticated space manoeuvre, manual docking requires the astronaut to connect together two orbiters travelling at 7,8 kilometres a second in space without a hitch. Shortly after the docking, the smiling and waving astronauts greeted the ground crew via camera.
“The manual docking was beautifully conducted. It was very accurate and swift,” said Liu Weibo, who is responsible for China’s astronaut system.
The manual docking was completed in only 7 minutes, 3 minutes faster than the automatic docking, said Liu.
China is the third country, after the United States and Russia, to acquire technologies and skills necessary for space rendezvous and docking and be able to supply manpower and material to an orbiting module via different docking methods.
The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft is scheduled to part from the Tiangong-1 module manually in four days and take the three astronauts back to earth next Friday, which would set a record for the longest space travel in the history of China’s manned space programme. Wu Ping said China has planned about US$3 billion in budget for the country’s space rendezvous and docking missions. — Xinhua.