Today, China is a lot closer to completing their suborbital space station plans: the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft has automatically rendezvoused and docked with the space lab Tiangong-1. It’s the third space agency ever to achieve achieve this feat.
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-worry-about-chinas-first-space-station-5845141
The first two were the Soviet Union and the European Space Agency. The Chinese space agency, the docking operation was flawless.
This is not a small feat. First, it demonstrates that they could perform a crucial operation required to establish a space base. But even more importantly, orbital rendezvous and docking is indispensable to launch missions to the Moon and Mars. This shows that China can handle this must-have requirement.
Shenzhou 8 will remain docked for 12 more days to then undock and dock again. It will return to Earth on November 17. Following this operation, the manned Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 10 will dock with Tiangong-1 in 2012. These missions will perform manual docking operations. [BBC News]
