China's astronaut corps has completed a nearly month-long cycle of underground cave training, which were conducted in part to prepare for future manned missions to the moon.
The training program was attended by a team from 28 astronauts. The training took place in the mountainous area of Chongqing Municipality in the southwest of the country. The astronauts were divided into four groups, each of which took turns holding sessions lasting six days and five nights in cold and damp underground conditions. Intensive training was designed as follows, to meet the real mission requirements as much as possible, expand the training system of Chinese astronauts and test their ability to cope with extreme environments.
The topics of the training included environmental monitoring, cave mapping, simulation of space–Earth communication, as well as team psychological and behavioral training. Research projects were focused on such directions, as human interaction with an extreme environment. Instructors also introduced unexpected simulated medical evacuations, to test teams' response to emergencies and their collaborative problem-solving abilities.
The program was organized by the China Astronaut Research and Training Center. It was the first time, when China conducted training, similar to the CAVES program of the European Space Agency. Each session of this program also included two days of jungle training.
China aims to land a pair of astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of the decade in a short-duration mission. The mission will involve two separate launches of the Changzheng-10 trinuclear missile, which will launch a separate crew ship and a lunar landing complex into orbit. After that, they will dock in lunar orbit before descending to the surface of the moon. The country also plans to build the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s.
Source: https://spacenews.com