Tony, this might sound crazy but might the Chinese consider a female commander for a flight to the station scheduled to begin in 2018?
I wasn't aware that the Shenzhou 10 back-ups had been confirmed by the Chinese.
The announcement of the launch schedule for Tiangong-2, Shenzhou-11 and Tianzhou-1 by Xinhua says SZ-11 will take just TWO taikonauts to TG-2. So, a longer stay in orbit for the crew compared with SZ-9 & 10 missions?
Next manned Chinese space mission is planned to last one monthThe plan is to have them stay inside the new lab for 30 days, doubling the previous Chinese record for the longest manned space mission. Nie Haisheng, chief of China's astronaut brigade, says staying in space for a longer period of time comes with a number of challenges.
...in the future, our astronauts are going to have to complete a lot of tasks during the space walks, as they will have to deal with issues such as equipment transfers, installation, repairs, maintenance and disassembling different components. We also have plans to carry out some scientific experiments outside the space capsule.
https://twitter.com/ESA_CAVES/status/541648706484064256Here a photo with Ye Guangfu and Chen Dong.Maybe someone at ESA has some more.
ChinaSpaceflight @cnspaceflight王亚平
Is that taikonaut Wang Yaping?
Do we have to use the term 'taikonaut'? The Chinese space agency doesn't, they use 'astronaut' in their English-language communications. With the proliferation of spaceflight, it'll be untenable to use country-specific titles for every country's spaceflight personnel, so we might as well start calling them all astronauts now.