A freighter carrying nearly seven tons of supplies has made its way to China’s Tiangong space station.
The robotic Tianzhou 10 cargo ship lifted off atop a Long March 7 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, on China’s Hainan Island, on Sunday (May 10) at 8:14 p.m. EDT (0014 GMT and 8:14 a.m. local time on May 11).
The freighter delivered more than 220 items that have a total weight of about 6.9 tons (6.3 metric tons), according to the state-run Chinese broadcaster CCTV.
The cargo haul includes about 620 pounds (280 kilograms) of scientific experiments in fluid physics and other fields, 1,540 pounds (700 kg) of propellant and the last of three new spacewalking spacesuits.
The first two of those suits were delivered on the Tianzhou 9 cargo flight, which lifted off last July and departed Tiangong on Wednesday (May 6) to make room for Tianzhou 10.
As its name suggests, Tianzhou 10 is the 10th Tianzhou spacecraft to take flight. These freighters, whose name translates to “Celestial Vessel,” are disposable, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere when their time in orbit is up.
Tianzhou missions actually predate the Tiangong space station. The first such cargo ship launched in April 2017, linking up in orbit with a prototype space lab called Tiangong 2.
China began building the current Tiangong outpost in April 2021, when it lofted the core module, which is known as Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”). The two other Tiangong modules, Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”) and Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”), launched in July 2022 and October 2022, respectively.
Tiangong generally supports three astronauts at a time. The trio currently living aboard the orbiting lab are Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang, who arrived on Oct. 31 on the Shenzhou 21 mission.