After nearly seven months in space, three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Friday, breaking the record for the longest time a Chinese crew has spent in orbit.
In the evening, the ship carrying Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang from the Shenzhou 21 crew landed at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia region of north China. As China gets ready to make its first lunar landing by 2030, they returned.
According to the China Manned Space Agency, which was cited by the official Xinhua News Agency, the crew had finished a number of tasks, including processing and transmitting experimental data and transferring any remaining supplies. According to Xinhua, they also told the Shenzhou 23 crew about their experience when they landed at the space station on Monday.

The crew had finished three spacewalk missions, according to a previous Xinhua article. Zhang Lu, who was also on an earlier Shenzhou 15 mission to the space station, has done seven such operations overall, making him the Chinese astronaut with the most spacewalks, according to Zhang Jingbo, a spokesperson for the space agency.
Zhang Lu claimed that upon his return to China, he had intense emotions. According to him, the astronauts' trip would not have been feasible without the support and care of their families and other crew members, as well as the backing of project officials.
Zhang Hongzhang remembered his stay on Earth.

"Looking at Earth from space, I really felt that humanity is an indivisible community with a shared future," he stated.
One of the three astronauts on board the Shenzhou 23 mission will spend a year in the Tiangong space station. "Heavenly Palace" is what Tiangong signifies in Chinese.
The astronauts are Zhu Yangzhu, the commander, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying, whose Mandarin transliteration of her name has also been identified by Chinese authorities as Li Jiaying. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Lai is the city's first astronaut on a space mission.