Swakopmund tracking station is a Chinese space tracking station in

Swakopmund Swakopmund (german: Mouth of the Swakop) is a city on the coast of western Namibia, west of the Namibian capital Windhoek via the B2 main road. It is the capital of the Erongo administrative district. The town has 44,725 inhabitants and covers ...

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

, South-West Africa which is used for the Chinese manned space programme. The full name of the station, according to the Namibian Ministry of Education, is China Telemetry, Tracking and Command Station. The station, which opened in 2001, tracks the re-entry of Chinese manned space vehicles. The station was built as a result of an agreement signed in October 2000 between the Namibian and Chinese governments. It was built by Windhoek Consulting Engineers at an estimated cost of $12 million Namibian dollars and opened in July 2001. The site is north of Swakopmund and is a 150m x 85m compound surrounded by a 2m high wall. There are two antennae for communicating with spacecraft, one 5m in diameter and the other 9m. The latter is 16m high. In March 2012 it was announced that it had participated in six launches. It was involved in the 29 June 2012 descent of

Shenzhou 9 Shenzhou 9 () was the fourth crewed spacecraft flight of China's Shenzhou program, launched at 18:37:24 CST (10:37:24 UTC), 16 June 2012. Shenzhou 9 was the second spacecraft and first crewed mission and expedition to dock with the Tiangong-1 ...

, the first manned craft to dock with Chinese space station

Tiangong 1 Tiangong-1 () was China's first prototype space station. It orbited Earth from September 2011 to April 2018, serving as both a crewed laboratory and an experimental testbed to demonstrate orbital rendezvous and docking capabilities during it ...

, and the craft with the first Chinese woman in space, Liu Yang. The

ground track A ground track or ground trace is the path on the surface of a planet directly below an aircraft's or satellite's trajectory. In the case of satellites, it is also known as a suborbital track, and is the vertical projection of the satellite's or ...

of the descending craft passed over the station on its way to land in

Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia, officially the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Its border includes most of the length of China's border with the country of Mongolia. Inner Mongolia also accounts for a ...

. The station is part of the Chinese Tracking, Telemetry, Command and Communications System which uses

S band The S band is a designation by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for a part of the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum covering frequencies from 2 to 4 gigahertz (GHz). Thus it crosses the convention ...

communications. It is one of three overseas stations - the other two are in

Karachi, Pakistan Karachi (; ur, ; ; ) is the most populous city in Pakistan and 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 20 million. It is situated at the southern tip of the country along the Arabian Sea coast. It is the former cap ...

and

Malindi, Kenya Malindi is a town on Malindi Bay at the mouth of the Sabaki River, lying on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya. It is 120 kilometres northeast of Mombasa. The population of Malindi was 119,859 as of the 2019 census. It is the largest urban centre ...

. The programme also uses Yuanwang tracking ships and

Tianlian Tianlian (Simplified Chinese: 天链, Traditional Chinese: 天鏈, English: ''Sky Link'') also known as CTDRS, is a Chinese data relay communication satellite constellation. The constellation serves to relay data from ground stations to spacecr ...

relay satellites.

References

{{Chinese space program Chinese space program facilities Shenzhou program Swakopmund Ground stations 2001 establishments in Namibia