China Says Astronauts Break Record with 9 Hour Spacewalk

Asia Pacific|Chinese Spacewalk Apparently Breaks a Record (Barely)

Two Chinese astronauts aboard their country’s orbiting space station spent nine hours working outside in the cold vacuum of space, the longest recorded spacewalk, the Chinese space administration has said.

The astronauts on China’s Shenzhou-19 mission, Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong, finished their first “extravehicular activities” — spacewalking in popular parlance — this week, apparently nudging past the previous record of eight hours and 56 minutes set by two American astronauts in 2001, according to China’s Manned Space Agency. The feat was another sign of China’s ambitions to project its power and prestige in space.

“While admiring the wondrous views in space, we also had a deep feeling of the weight and greatness of the manned space endeavor,” one of the astronauts, Mr. Song, said after the spacewalk on Tuesday, according to a Chinese state television report.

The astronauts blasted into space in late October as part of a mission to build and maintain China’s Tiangong Space Station. They were accompanied by a third astronaut-engineer, Wang Haoze, who stayed inside the space station during the spacewalk, helping her colleagues.

The three astronauts are scheduled to spend six months in orbit on the Tiangong station, holding experiments and performing a series of spacewalks, Chinese news reports have said. Chinese space planners hope that the Tiangong mission will be a steppingstone to sending astronauts to the moon in coming years.

The first spacewalk took place in 1965, when a Soviet astronaut spent 16 minutes outside his craft. Months later, an American astronaut completed one. The first spacewalk by a Chinese astronaut was in 2008, lasting 19 minutes.

China’s Manned Space Agency did not immediately claim the spacewalk as a world record, simply noting that it was the longest spacewalk for Chinese astronauts — perhaps waiting for international validation of a world record.

The agency also said that the two astronauts ventured outside the Tiangong — a dangerous activity even with careful preparation — for a serious purpose: installing equipment to protect the station from debris in space, and inspecting other equipment on its exterior.

The three astronauts are not the only life-forms on China’s space station. They are carrying fruit flies to study “how reduced magnetism and microgravity affect the behavior and growth” of the flies, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.