First glimpses of China's new space station Heavenly Palace unveiled at expo

The first elements of the International Space Station (ISS) were sent up to Earth’s orbit 20 years ago, and the station has been **occupied by humans every day for 18 of those years.** Currently, the ISS is the only operating station for spacecrafts in orbit. But that could change very soon. China revealed some life-sized replicas of components going into a space station of its own making. The new station — ‘Tiangong-2’ or ‘Heavenly Palace’ in Chinese — was unveiled at China’s largest aerospace exhibition, Airshow China on Monday, AFP reported. Tiangong-2’s core module forms the station’s backbone and hub. At 17 metres wide, it can house three astronauts, the report said. The core module for the Chinese station is expected to launch as early as 2020. This module is much smaller than that of the ISS, which is the size of a football field counting its solar panels. The Chinese station is also roughly one-fifth the mass of the ISS. [caption id=“attachment_5518051” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] A replica of the core module of Tiangong-2. AFP[/caption] While the space station will technically belong to China, it would be open to astronauts from any UN countries, unlike the ISS today. China is not one of the international partners in the ISS project, and no Chinese astronauts have been aboard it. The country sent up a prototype space station in 2011, the Tiangong-1, which **ended with more than a few scientific takeaways** for this second attempt. Tiangong-1 hosted astronauts from two manned missions in 2012 and 2013 and was sent into hibernation soon after this second mission in case the launch of Tiangong-2 was not a success. This period of space sleep lasted nearly three full years before it was woken up and sent instructions in 2016, to which the station did not respond. In what some thought was an April fool’s prank, the space station prototype broke apart, came hurtling through the atmosphere in pieces, eventually falling into the Pacific Ocean on 1 April 2018. The loss of control meant leaving the station to its own devices, succumbing to the slow, spiral fall towards Earth’s from the gravity that every stationed object in low-Earth orbit actively resists to keep it from crashing down. [caption id=“attachment_5518071” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] This is China’s second attempt at having a space station of its own in Earth’s orbit. AFP[/caption] “Some brave person in the Chinese space agency said ‘What if Tiangong-2 doesn’t go up okay? Then we’ll be screwed. We should keep Tiangong-1 up there’,” Dr Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts  told New Scientist. “They made a bet that it would be happy hibernating in orbit and it would be fine when they woke it back up again. They lost the bet.” China’s second run at having a space station in orbit could have implications for space agencies worldwide. The ISS is set to be retired in 2024, after which Tiangong-2 will likely be the only space station in orbit until the Lunar Orbital Gateway is assembled in the early 2030s. “There is no doubt that China will use its station in a similar way as the ISS partners are using their outpost: research, technology and as a stepping-stone for deep-space exploration,” Chen Lan, an analyst at GoTaikonauts.com, a website following the Chinese space programme,  told AFP. China expects to finish construction of the station in 2022 and run the Tiangong-2 for at least 10 years. Here’s hoping this second ‘Heavenly Palace’ fares better (and longer) than the first.