I remember those, they're amazing.

I only have the first 3 saved down. Anyone got the whole set?

Deng at 53 is actually the 2nd oldest on the crew. The commander Fei Junlong is 57. He's story is a lot like Alan Shepard in that he was also one of the first batch of five taikonauts. He got to fly on the 2nd CNSA manned mission Shenzhou 6 as the commander back in 2005. Now 17 years later he's commander again for Shenzhou 15 and the oldest taikonaut in the corp. He also holds the highest rank among all current taikonauts as a major general in PLASSF.

Alan Shepard had a 10 year gap between Freedom 7 and Apollo 14.

Well the Tianhe-2 core module is in storage and all ready to go, it was built together with Tianhe-1 as a backup should the launch go wrong and since it wasn't required it's available for whatever mission you can think of immediately.

Lab 3 and lab 4 do not exist yet, so they will need to be built first. CNSA has expressed interest that they welcome other countries if they want to be a partner and build a module of their own to attach to Tianhe-2. Many years ago Italy expressed interest and came up with a module design called HERD (High Energy cosmic-Ray Detection) but that's probably dead now.

Here's a rough idea of what phase 2 expansion will look like. Obviously lab 3 and 4 are just placeholders and clones of Mengtian and Wentian without the solar panels. Note during phase 2 expansion Tianhe-1's solar panels will be detached and moved to the end of Mengtian and Wentian.

Tiangong is in fact set to host experiments from 17 countries, the results they generate will belong to both China as well as the origin nations.

Xuntian Space Telescope is scheduled for launch next year. Yes it will co-orbit with the station and berth to the station once in a while to be serviced by the crew, then move away to do its own observation.

I'm not sure how the docking works though. It may be that Xuntian has a regular docking port and hard docks to the station like a Shenzhou, or alternatively it may not and just have the little grab spots for the stations robotic arm to grab onto.

There are in fact 3 docking ports after the two lab modules take up the berthing ports. There are plans to use the forward docking port to dock the backup Tianhe-2 core module to then allow another two lab modules in the future in a phase 2 expansion plan which will double the current size.