DISCONTINUED L4805 TIANGONG-1 CHINA'S SPACE LAB MODULE

Tiangong 1 (Eng. Heavenly Palace No. 1) was a Chinese spacecraft, or rather an orbital module. The weight of the ship was 8,506 kg, its length was 10.4 meters, and its diameter was 3.35 meters. The ship's crew consists of 2 to 3 people. Tiangong 1 was placed in orbit in September 2011, and already in November, the Shenzhou 8 unmanned spacecraft successfully moored to it. Several days after the first attempt, Shenzhou 8 was remotely unmoored and successfully carried out the second mooring maneuver again. Finally, on June 18, 2012, the manned ship Shenzhou 9 moored to the Tiangong 1 module, and Chinese astronauts (called Taikonauts) boarded the module and stayed on it for 10 days, then happily returned to Earth. In 2013, a manned spacecraft moored again successfully to Tiangong 1. The orbital module burned down in the Earth's atmosphere in April 2018 - as originally planned. Assume that the Chinese space agency treated the docking and sending of manned spacecraft to Tiangong 1 as vital elements of trials and tests before sending the taikonauts to their own - much larger - space station.