China's Astronauts Just Pulled Off Their First Tiangong Spacewalk
Shenzhou-12 crewmates completed a roughly seven-hour EVA outside the Tianhe core module, China's first spacewalk since 2008.
China just notched a genuinely big milestone in its new space station program. Overnight into July 4, Shenzhou-12 crewmates Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo stepped outside the Tianhe core module for roughly seven hours of extravehicular activity — the country’s first spacewalk since Zhai Zhigang’s brief EVA on Shenzhou-7 back in 2008. That’s a thirteen-year gap, and it says a lot about how methodically China has been building up to this moment with Tiangong.
The work itself wasn’t ceremonial. Liu installed a foot restraint and a small work platform onto the station’s robotic arm, then rode the arm out to a work site — essentially using Tianhe’s robotics the way the ISS crew uses Canadarm2 to ferry astronauts around the exterior. Meanwhile Tang stayed tethered to handrails on the module’s hull and helped mount a panoramic camera, presumably to give mission control (and probably state broadcasters) a better view of future operations outside the station.
What strikes me about this is how it fits into the bigger picture of what China’s trying to do this year. Tianhe only launched back in April as the core module of the full station, and Shenzhou-12 put three astronauts aboard it in June for what’s shaping up to be a three-month stay — already the longest crewed mission in Chinese spaceflight history. A spacewalk this early in that mission, using hardware installed just a couple months ago, is a strong signal that the systems are working close to plan.
It’s also worth noting the timing relative to everything else going on in orbit right now. This EVA lands in the same stretch as SpaceX’s steady rideshare cadence and just ahead of Branson’s and Bezos’s suborbital hops later this month — a reminder that “the new space race” isn’t just a private-sector story. China is running a parallel, state-driven program with its own timeline: more modules for Tiangong are slated to launch over the next year or two, and every spacewalk like this one is effectively a systems check for the assembly and maintenance work that’ll be required once the station is fully built out.
The foot-restraint-and-robotic-arm choreography is also a tell. NASA and Roscosmos worked out that exact playbook — anchor an astronaut to the arm, use it as a cherry-picker for tasks that would otherwise require free-floating translation across the hull — over decades of Shuttle and ISS operations. Seeing China adopt essentially the same approach on its first real EVA of this era suggests they’ve done their homework rather than trying to reinvent the choreography from scratch.
If Shenzhou-12’s crew keeps hitting milestones like this through their three-month stay, it sets up an ambitious back half of the decade for Tiangong: more launches, more spacewalks, and eventually a full three-module station. Worth keeping an eye on how quickly the cadence picks up from here.