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Three Chinese astronauts who had been stranded for days in space after a suspected piece of space junk hit their spacecraft are back on Earth, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSE) announced Friday.
The agency also revealed that they had found tiny cracks in one of the Shenzou-20 crew's return capsule's windows -- rendering it unusable.
The astronauts instead returned onboard Shenzhou-21: The spacecraft had originally been used by Shenzou-20's replacement crew, and China had planned to keep the capsule docked at the Tiangong station to return those astronauts at the end of their mission, which is currently slated for April 2026.
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"I'm very glad that they got home, but it is a bit disconcerting that the replacement crew apparently does not have a vehicle to come back to Earth," said Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at Colorado-based nonprofit Secure World Foundation.
CMSE told the Chinese news agency Xinhua that a new spacecraft, Shenzhou-22, will be launched at an "appropriate time in the future," meaning that Tiangong's remaining three-man crew currently has no means of returning to Earth in the event of an emergency.
It's unclear what kind of debris struck Shenzhou-20, but Samson speculated that it was likely tiny -- perhaps between 1 and 10 centimeters in diameter -- which is too small for astronomers to track.
"This again underlines the argument for not deliberately creating debris in orbit," Samson said.