On September 25, 2008, a Long March 2F rocket launched Shenzhou 7 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, carrying Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng. It was China's third crewed spaceflight. The mission lasted about 68 hours and the capsule landed in Inner Mongolia on September 28.
The object was the spacewalk. Zhai Zhigang left the orbital module on September 27 wearing the Feitian suit, a Chinese-made suit of about 120 kilograms, and spent about 20 minutes outside, waving a small Chinese flag and retrieving a sample of solid lubricant that had been mounted on the outside. Liu Boming stayed at the hatch in the Russian Orlan suit and handed him the flag. The operation was broadcast live.
The programme had been running for sixteen years. Project 921, the crewed space programme, was approved in 1992, and the first Chinese astronaut, Yang Liwei, flew Shenzhou 5 in October 2003, which made China the third country to launch a person into orbit on its own. Shenzhou 6 in 2005 carried two men for five days. The design of the Shenzhou spacecraft follows the Russian Soyuz, which it resembles closely, and the Chinese space suit is generally agreed to be derived from Orlan technology, though the Feitian was made in China.
What the mission was for was the next one. Shenzhou 7 tested the technology needed for a space station: the extravehicular activity, the airlock in the orbital module, and the relay satellite that made the television coverage possible. The Tiangong 1 laboratory module was launched in 2011, Shenzhou 9 docked with it in 2012 with China's first woman astronaut, Liu Yang, aboard, and the Tiangong station, with three modules, was completed in November 2022.
The programme runs in parallel with the International Space Station, from which China is excluded by American law. It has its own launch site on Hainan, its own tracking ships, and its own navigation satellite system, Beidou. It has also had failures: the Long March rockets have had launch failures, and in 2022 a suspected collision with debris damaged Shenzhou 20 while it was docked.
All three astronauts flew again. Zhai Zhigang commanded Shenzhou 13 in 2021 and became the first person to spend more than 100 days on the Tiangong station. Jing Haipeng has flown four times and has spent the most time in space of any Chinese astronaut.