Chinese astronauts return to Earth after 6 months on space station WSOC TV [Video]

BEIJING — (AP) — A Chinese spacecraft returned to Earth on Tuesday with three astronauts who completed a six-month mission aboard the country’s orbiting space station.

The Shenzhou-17 craft carrying Tang Hongbo, Tang Shengjie and Jiang Xinlin landed at the Dongfeng site in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the Gobi Desert shortly before 6 p.m. It comes roughly four days after the Shenzhou-18 mission docked with the station with their three-member replacement crew.

China built its own space station after being excluded from the International Space Station, largely because of U.S. concerns over the Chinese military’s total control of the space program amid a sharpening competition in technology between the two geopolitical rivals. This year, the Chinese station is slated for two cargo spacecraft missions and two manned spaceflight missions.

China’s ambitious space program aims to put astronauts on the moon by 2030, as well as bring back samples from Mars around the same year and launch …