Terrifying New Details Emerge on Last Year’s Stranding of Chinese Taikonauts

It’s a scene in so many space movies: The actor looks out through a window at the vacuum of space, and watches as a crack slowly forms and stretches across the screen. This week, Space.com surfaced some interview footage (embedded below) with the Chinese taikonauts who lived through something almost as dramatic.

The incident occurred in November, when an anomaly aboard the Shenzhou 20 mission left three of them temporarily stranded in space.

“I was the one who went for checks,” said mission commander Chen Dong (and I’ll apologize here for the poor translations, which a Canadian like I certainly can’t improve upon). “I was through the capsule with the naked eye when I spotted something like a triangular on the viewport.”

For a moment, his brain identified it as a leaf on the windshield, but then he realized that it was, in fact, something far more dangerous. It was a crack, caused by the impact from a small piece of space debris. They’ll likely never know exactly what the debris was, but it’s thought to have been less than a millimeter across.

“I wasn’t really nervous, actually,” says taikonaut Wang Jie. “The outermost layer of the viewport is a protective layer, and inside it there are two pressure-bearing layers. We are safe as long as the cabin pressure doesn’t change.” He also expressed confidence in the ground crew’s ability to keep them safe.

The inspection actually required a pen-like microscope, which revealed cracks running. “We could see very clearly the small cracks [with the microscope]. Several were relatively long, and one was shorter. We could also see that some of the cracks had penetrated through.”

This all played out over the course of days, not seconds, but it’s still terrifying to consider.

These tiny but serious impact photos show how ruinous the damage from even small impacts can be. Credit: NASA

As a result of the impact, the crew had to leave the Shenzhou 20 craft and return to Earth on the Shenzhou 21 capsule that had been intended to carry their relief crew back home. This got them home, but it left Shenzhou 20 still docked, and the relief crew stranded without a usable vehicle.

Eventually, the empty Shenzhou 20 capsule was brought back to Earth, and the Shenzhou 21 crew came back on yet another capsule sent up to retrieve them.

In all, it’s an impressive show of capacity from the Chinese space program, if nothing else. NASA has sometimes struggled to respond to problems in space due to lack of spacecraft, though that’s become less of a problem in recent years; China, it seems, has no problem plowing money into its space program.

As can only be expected, the incident is sparking renewed concerns about catastrophe in space, and with good reason. We may not know just what hit the station, but we do know that, in the current crowded skies, disaster could be as close as a single major collision or ejection of debris.

Thankfully, this time, the impact was small enough to function as a warning.