#shenzhou-21

#shenzhou-21

Three Chinese astronauts who had been stranded for days in space after a suspected piece of space junk hit their spacecraft are back on Earth, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSE) announced on Friday. The agency also revealed that it had found tiny cracks in one of the windows of the crew's Shenzou 20 return capsulerendering it unusable. The astronauts instead returned onboard the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft, which had originally been used by Shenzou 20's replacement crew.

China's Shenzhou-21 spaceship launched Friday, carrying its youngest astronaut and small mammals to the country's orbiting space station. The Tiangong space station, crewed by rotating teams of three astronauts, is the centerpiece of China's multibillion-dollar space program. Beijing aims to send astronauts to the moon by the decade's end and eventually build a lunar base, in a bid to rival the US and Russian space programs.