Tiangong ("Heavenly Palace") is China's modular space station: a three-module, T-shaped outpost in low Earth orbit around 390 km, permanently crewed by rotating three-person Shenzhou crews since 2022. It is the only crewed station in orbit besides the ISS — and entirely Chinese-built and operated.
Understanding Tiangong
The programme behind the palace
Tiangong is step three of a patient, decades-long ladder China announced in 1992: first crewed flight (Shenzhou 5, 2003), then orbital laboratories to master rendezvous, docking and spacewalks (Tiangong-1 and -2, 2011–2019), then the permanent station. Each capability was demonstrated before being depended upon — automated docking, crew ferry, cargo resupply, long-duration life support — so the station's assembly proceeded with striking smoothness: eleven major launches across nineteen months, no partner dependencies, no major reworks. The same incrementalism now points upward: module expansions to a cross configuration have been mooted, the Xuntian telescope extends the station into an observatory campus, and the crewed programme's next ladder — lunar — reuses the pattern. Understanding Tiangong means reading it not as a project but as an institutional habit of finishing rungs.
Spotting Tiangong from your garden
Tiangong is one of the brightest artificial objects in the sky — large solar wings, low orbit — and its 41.5° inclination makes it a familiar sight across a broad band of latitudes, though unlike the ISS it never overflies far-northern Europe or Canada. Like all stations it is visible when sunlit against a dark sky: the hour or two after dusk and before dawn, crossing west-to-east in a few minutes at up to magnitude −2, an easy naked-eye object when the pass is high. Because the station manoeuvres regularly — reboosts against drag, debris avoidance — predictions are freshest close to the event. This site's tracker computes passes for your exact location, alongside the live position; the same tools that serve ISS pass hunters work identically here.