Daughter of the Chinese astronaut remembers the Shenzhou-7 mission and the false fire alarm

   

Sunday's People's Liberation Army (PLA) newspaper ran an article by Liu Qianting, daughter of astronaut Liu Boming, about her father's flight to Shenzhou-7. Liu Boming, Zhai Zhigang and Jing Haipeng took part in the Shenzhou-7 mission in the 2008, during which Zhai took the first walk in space from a Chinese astronaut. In the PLA Daily article, Liu Qianting said that her family held a "family meeting" every Saturday and her father told her his stories. His father was fascinated by space and a big fan of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on the moon, when he was a junior high school student. He joined the PLA astronaut program without hesitation. Liu Qianting said that his father was selected for Shenzhou-7 in the 2008 and began four months of intense training while he was preparing for his junior high school entrance exam, but his father managed to find time to see her at school before the mission. “I will never forget the day on September 25, 2008, when the spaceship exploded, taking my father, as well as my mother's heart and mine, into space,” he said. "That night, I found my mother a little upset, I told her that" everything will be fine, and we should rest first and see the latest update the next morning ". "But the next morning, I found her sleeping on the sofa with the TV still on." Liu Qianting recalled the moment the live broadcast showed his father and Zhai preparing for the spacewalk when a fire alarm went off. “My mother and I were both terrified, I knew that a fire under such circumstances had killed American astronaut Edward White,” he said. "My strength is gone and I have not heard any sound." What was worse, the spacecraft left the monitoring zone and there were no images or sounds. "The seconds seemed to last for a century, and we finally heard the conversation between my father and Zhai." Liu Boming told Zhai to "wait and carry out the mission anyway". "I suddenly burst into tears and realized that for my father and the other astronauts, the mission always exceeds their lives." A spokesman for the Chinese manned space program later explained that the fire alarm was caused by a sensor error. Liu Qianting said that before the Shenzhou-7 module returned to Earth, he visited the command center of the mission and spoke with his father in space. "I asked him what the space was like." The twinkling stars are just below my feet. They are very, very beautiful, ”he replied. Shenzhou-7 returned to Earth after about three days in space and Zhai's spacewalk made China the third country to conduct extra-space activities in space, following the United States and Russia.

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