Wang Yaping, an astronaut, who recently walked in space, is a citizen of _________.

Question

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Correct — option (1), China. Wang Yaping is a Chinese astronaut, and the spacewalk the stem refers to took place on 7 November 2021, when the China Manned Space Agency announced that an extravehicular activity was under way outside the country's space station, carried out by Zhai Zhigang, the commander of the Shenzhou 13 mission, and by Wang Yaping. With it she became the first Chinese woman to walk in space, and she had already become the first woman to board the Tiangong space station when the mission arrived there in October 2021. It was not her first flight: she had flown earlier on Shenzhou 10 in 2013, during which she delivered a science lesson broadcast from orbit to schoolchildren across China, an event that made her one of the best-known figures of the country's space programme. Two pieces of context make the answer easy to fix in memory rather than merely to recall. The first is that China conducts human spaceflight independently: it launches its own crews on its own Shenzhou spacecraft, it has built its own space station, Tiangong, and it is not a partner in the International Space Station. So a report of a spacewalk from a station that is neither American nor Russian points to China before any name is read. The second is the sequence of Chinese women in space — Liu Yang was the first, on Shenzhou 9 in 2012, and Wang Yaping followed on Shenzhou 10 in 2013 and again on Shenzhou 13 in 2021, adding the first Chinese woman's spacewalk on the later flight. The paper was written on 23 January 2022, less than three months after the walk, which places this squarely in the recent-news window the Commission draws from. The Marathi column prints the country options in the genitive, as चीनच्या and so on; that is grammar, not a difference of meaning, and the answer remains option (1).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) South Korea has sent a person to space but has no independent human spaceflight programme and no space station of its own. Its single astronaut to date, Yi So-yeon, travelled to the International Space Station in 2008 aboard a Russian Soyuz, becoming the first Korean in space; she was a woman, which is what makes this option more than filler, because a candidate who remembers that the first Korean in orbit was female may attach that memory to any subsequent news of an Asian woman in space. But a flight as a visiting crew member on a partner's vehicle is a different thing from a spacewalk outside a station your own country built, and the news of 7 November 2021 concerned the latter. Keeping national programmes separate from national astronauts prevents this confusion entirely.  (c) Japan has a long and substantial presence in human spaceflight, but not an independent one. Its astronauts fly through the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on the launch vehicles of its partners, and Japan's contribution to the International Space Station is the Kibo laboratory module together with a cargo vehicle; it does not launch its own crews and has no station of its own. A candidate who associates space technology in East Asia with Japan's engineering reputation may choose it for that reason, which is precisely the association the option is placed to catch. The distinguishing fact is institutional rather than personal: the spacewalk in question was conducted outside a Chinese station under the direction of the China Manned Space Agency, and no other Asian country was in a position to conduct one.  (d) Vietnam has no human spaceflight programme. Its one connection with crewed spaceflight is historical and worth knowing for its own sake: Pham Tuan flew aboard a Soviet Soyuz in 1980 under the Interkosmos programme, which carried citizens of allied states as guest cosmonauts, and he was the first Vietnamese and the first Asian to go into space — a programme that also carried India's Rakesh Sharma in 1984. That is a flight as a guest of another country's programme forty years before the event in this stem, and it has no bearing on a spacewalk from a Chinese station in 2021. The option completes a set of four Asian countries and rewards a candidate who can distinguish a country that has produced an astronaut from a country that operates a space programme.

Concept: China's human spaceflight programme is one of only three in the world capable of launching people into orbit independently, the others being Russia and the United States. Its crewed spacecraft is the Shenzhou, and its space station, Tiangong, was assembled in orbit through a series of missions of which Shenzhou 13, launched in October 2021, was an early crewed occupation; China is not a participant in the International Space Station, which is why its activities are reported separately and why a spacewalk from a Chinese station is unmistakable once the institutional picture is clear. Wang Yaping is a serving pilot and astronaut who flew on Shenzhou 10 in 2013 and on Shenzhou 13 in 2021. Her 2013 flight is remembered in China for a lesson she broadcast from orbit to schoolchildren; her 2021 flight made her the first woman aboard Tiangong and, on 7 November 2021, the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk, working outside the station with the mission commander Zhai Zhigang. The first Chinese woman in space was Liu Yang, on Shenzhou 9 in 2012. For an Indian candidate the comparison worth holding is with India's own programme: Rakesh Sharma flew in 1984 aboard a Soviet Soyuz under the Interkosmos arrangement, and India's independent crewed effort is the Gaganyaan programme of the Indian Space Research Organisation, which was under development at the time this paper was written.

State PCS 2021 Q96 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q96 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer