WASHINGTON – In a groundbreaking achievement, two Chinese astronauts completed a world-record spacewalk lasting over nine hours, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced this week. Astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong of the Shenzhou-19 mission conducted the spacewalk on Dec 17 outside the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit.
The mission surpassed the previous spacewalk record set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001, lasting four minutes longer. Clad in their Feitian spacesuits, Cai and Song successfully installed space-debris protection devices and performed other exterior maintenance tasks on the station.
“They successfully completed all the planned tasks and felt very excited about it,” said Wu Hao, a staffer at the China Astronaut Research and Training Centre, during an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television.
Since the first-ever spacewalk by the Soviet Union in 1965, countries like the US and Russia have conducted hundreds of such missions. China joined the spacewalking ranks in 2008, steadily advancing its capabilities in recent years.
China’s achievement this week is part of a series of milestones underscoring its growing prominence in space exploration. Notably, Beijing landed its first rover on Mars in 2021 and in 2024 retrieved lunar rock samples from the moon’s far side during the Chang’e-6 mission.
Looking ahead, China plans to land its first astronauts on the Moon by 2030, aspiring to become the second nation to achieve this feat after the US. Beijing is also spearheading its International Lunar Research Station program, aiming to establish a moon base on the Moon’s South Pole. This effort is seen as a competitor to NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to return US astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972.
China’s record-breaking spacewalk underscores its ambitions to position itself as a global leader in space exploration, rivaling the US and other established spacefaring nations.