Chinese spacecraft successfully docks in orbit

Xinhuanet : Early this morning, China’s Shenzhou 9 capsule, with Commander Jing Haipeng and flight engineers Liu Yang and Liu Wang, automatically docked with the Tiangong 1 space laboratory. It is China’s fourth crewed mission and the first one in which the crew rendezvoused with, docked at, and transferred to an orbiting space station. The crew will be conducting testsâmdash;such as the effects of weightlessness on the human bodyâmdash;that are similar to those carried out on the International Space Station (ISS). Later this week, the astronauts, or taikonauts as they are called in Mandarin, will attempt a manual docking with Tiangong 1. All the maneuvers are practice for China’s space agency to launch and operate a permanently crewed space station, which will be constructed over the next few years. The permanent station will be roughly 15% the size of the ISS.