China Finally Has The First Female Astronaut To Do A Spacewalk, Wang Yaping!

JAKARTA - Wang Yaping has just made history, she became the first woman in China to travel in space. Now, Yaping along with mission commander Zhai Zhigang and other members are on board the country's new space station, Tiangong.

According to a report from China's Manned Space Agency (CMSA), Yaping successfully completed a 6.5-hour spacewalk in the early hours of Monday with Zhigang. The third member of the Shenzhou-13 crew, Ye Guangfu, lives on the space station to support the space travel of the core module.

Yaping was born in 1980 in Yantai, Shandong Province, East China. The 41-year-old taikonaut was selected to be part of the crew of the Shenzhou-10 space mission in April 2013.

Quoted from CNN International, Monday, November 8, in this mission and space explorer, Zhigang was the commander, and Yaping as his partner stepped out of the node cabin of the Tianhe space station core module on Sunday night, to carry out the crew's first extravehicular (EVA) activity. . Yaping has officially become the first Chinese woman to carry out a spacewalk mission.

Both are wearing a new generation Feitian spacesuit specially designed for EVA. They attach the leg stop and work platform to the robot arm before they work together to attach the suspension device and transfer the connector to the robot arm. CMSA notes that the robotic arm plays an important supporting role in the process.

CMSA also highlighted that the spacewalk they did was the first in Chinese history, where a man and a woman did it together. However, Yaping is the second Chinese woman to be in space after Liu Yang. He made history by joining the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft in 2012.

Before Yaping, only 15 women worldwide had gone on a spacewalk since 1984, when Soviet astronaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first to do so.

So far, most female space explorers have come from NASA astronauts. Women space explorers are, "an integral part of manned space, and Wang has left her mark in history thanks to her courage," Yang Yuguang, deputy chairman of the Space Transport Committee for the International Astronautical Federation, told the Global Times.

The Shenzhou-13 crew will undertake one or two more space trips over the next six months, this is the longest stint in space by a Chinese astronaut.

China aims to have the station fully manned and operational by December 2022, an ambitious target that appears to be on track. In September, three other Chinese astronauts successfully completed a three-month stay on the station, during which they worked on the station's core modules and made two space trips to install equipment.