Tiangong-1

Tiangong-1 was China's first prototype space station, an 8,500 kilogram space laboratory module launched uncrewed on 29 September 2011 aboard the first Long March 2F/T rocket. It served mainly as a testbed for orbital rendezvous and docking, and secondarily as a small crewed laboratory. Three Shenzhou spacecraft visited it: the uncrewed Shenzhou 8 in November 2011, then the crewed Shenzhou 9 in June 2012 and Shenzhou 10 in June 2013, whose crews included China's first two female astronauts, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping. The station had about 15 cubic metres of pressurised volume and used passive APAS-type docking connectors. China announced in March 2016 that contact had been lost, and because a controlled deorbit was not possible it made an uncontrolled re-entry over the southern Pacific Ocean on 2 April 2018. It was the first operational component of the Tiangong program that later led to the modular Tiangong space station.